Happy AWS re:Invent week, everyone! While we have some larger announcements coming out this week (keep an eye out), we’d be remiss if we didn’t take the time to also look back at what our teams have been working on over the past few weeks.
While we didn’t have a stated theme for November, you will see that two of our updates revolve around building templates or examples to help make achieving your goals easier with CloudZero. Whether it’s through enhancing the UI, improving cost amortization, or simply providing templates outside of the product itself, our ultimate goal is always to help our customers get around roadblocks that hinder them from progressing their FinOps practice.
Read below to learn about the most notable features and enhancements our team has rolled out in the past month.
AWS Support Amortization
What it is: We’ve often heard from customers, particularly the ones working on finance teams, that the way AWS charges for monthly support as a single charge on the first day of the month can make it difficult to proportionally spread those charges across different parts of the business. This new feature allows AWS support charges to be proportionally amortized throughout the month and across different aspects of the organization, such as by business unit (BU), product, feature, etc.
Customer value: This new feature, which your FinOps Account Manager can toggle on for you, makes it much easier for finance teams to get an accurate view of these costs evenly spread across the full month rather than in a lump sum on a single day.
Status: Generally Available
CSV Import → API Example Template
What it is: In a fast-follow improvement of our recently released drag-and-drop CSV upload feature, when a user uploads a new CSV file into the system, CloudZero will automatically provide examples of an API URL and an API JSON template. These templates make it easy for users who would prefer to share telemetry data via API to do so by providing the correct destination and formatting to leverage the API for automated data ingestion. Once they’ve got the URL and the JSON template, all they need to do is fill in a few marked areas (for example: <your timestamp here> and <your value here>) and they’re ready to start sending telemetry data to the system via the API going forward.
Customer value: As easy as the new drag-and-drop CSV upload feature is, it is still a manual process for someone to upload the file into the UI. This enhancement makes it much easier for users to take the next step and automate this data ingestion through the API with as little engineering knowledge and effort as possible. Learn more about the API template for our unit cost telemetry streams here and our cost allocation telemetry streams here.
Status: Generally Available
AnyCost API Public Repo Examples
What it is: Our goal with the AnyCost API has always been to make it as easy as possible to build on CloudZero with whatever cost data you want to ingest. In October we released enhancements to the API itself that made it easier than ever before, and in November we doubled down by providing a public GitHub repo with an example integration that admins can use to get themselves comfortable building with the API.
Customer value: Admins who are not familiar or comfortable with the AnyCost API can now use this example adaptor as a model or guide for structuring their own AnyCost adaptor simply by modifying the example to fit their business case. Our ultimate goal is to make it refreshingly simple for all customers to ingest 100% of their cloud spend, regardless of which provider the cost data is coming from. You can learn more about getting started here.
Status: Generally Available
The Cloud Cost Playbook
The step-by-step guide to cost maturity
