Today, AWS launched a unified Billing and Cost Management console to help you manage your AWS cloud finances more easily and efficiently. The unified console includes a new home page with insights and recommendations to help you make faster, better-informed decisions, more intuitive navigation to streamline your workflows, and improved resources to help you learn and implement Cloud Financial Management best practices. This post explains how you can use the unified Billing and Cost Management console to manage your AWS cloud finances and answers frequently asked questions.
Announcing a unified Billing and Cost Management console
To manage your cloud finances effectively, you need easy access to the right data and insights, so you can prioritize the most impactful actions. Cloud Financial Management practitioners have told us that they spend too much time and effort using multiple tools, consoles, and pages to gather information before they can decide which actions to prioritize. With the new AWS Billing and Cost Management Console Home, you can gain powerful insights including spending trends (along dimensions including application, service, and member account), whether any cost anomalies or budget overruns require attention, and what the most impactful savings opportunities are, all in one place. From there, you can prioritize your next steps with tailored recommendations, and transition from insights to impact with clear calls to action that guide you to the right tool for the job.
Once you’ve decided what Cloud Financial Management actions to prioritize, you need streamlined, efficient workflows to complete those actions. Before today, customers used the Billing console to understand their charges, make payments, and allocate costs across their organization, and used the Cost Management console to deep-dive spending trends and find savings opportunities. Customers told us, however, that they regularly used both consoles in their day-to-day work. Now, with the unified Billing and Cost Management console, you can find your frequently-used tools (such as Bills, Payments, Cost Explorer, and Budgets) in a single location. The updated navigation pane groups pages into more intuitive categories such as “Billing and payments,” “Cost analysis,” and “Savings and commitments.” This change makes it easier to find what you’re looking for, and lets you get more done in a single console. You can migrate to the new navigation at your own pace, using a toggle in the left navigation menu to revert to the previous navigation structure.
Finally, customers have told us that they’re looking for more guidance on Cloud Financial Management best practices, and help choosing the right tool to accomplish their objectives. You can now use the new Getting started page to learn Cloud Financial Management best practices and understand what tasks you can complete in the unified Billing and Cost Management console. Each task includes quick links to get started right away, and documentation links to learn more.