Cloud cost and FinOps cheat sheet (AWS)

1. 1How cloud billing worksWhat every line on a cloud bill is made of, how accounts or projects roll up into an invoice, the different kinds of cost, and a map of the cost tools on each provider.8 concepts

   1. 1Pricing unitsEvery charge is a quantity times a unit price: seconds or hours for compute, GB per month for storage, requests or invocations for serverless and APIs, GB for…
   2. 2AWS accounts and consolidated billingEach AWS account owns its resources and charges.
   3. 3List, contracted, billed and effective costList is the public price.
   4. 4Actual versus amortised costActual cost shows charges when they are billed, so an upfront commitment appears as one big charge.
   5. 5Hidden cost linesCharges compute-only estimates miss: data transfer, NAT gateways, load balancers, public IPv4 addresses, logs, snapshots, idle managed databases, marketplace…
   6. 6Billing data latencyCost data arrives in batches, hours behind usage, and a month keeps changing for a few days after it ends.
   7. 7Pricing calculatorsFree tools from each provider to estimate a design: every resource, size, hours, storage, requests and data transfer, with assumptions written down.
   8. 8Cost tools on each providerThe same FinOps job has a different tool name on each cloud.

   8 in this chapterOpen this chapter
2. 2Reading the bill and taggingThe cost tool and detailed export on your cloud, tags and labels, a tagging policy template, enforcement, untaggable spend and your first billing query.8 concepts

   1. 1AWS Cost ExplorerAWS's interactive cost view: pick a range and granularity, group by service, account, Region, usage type, tag or cost category, filter, and switch between…
   2. 2AWS Data Exports and CUR 2.0Scheduled exports of detailed billing data to S3: CUR 2.0, FOCUS 1.2 with AWS columns, cost optimisation recommendations and carbon emissions, with the columns…
   3. 3Tags and labels for costKey-value pairs on resources, such as team=payments, that flow into billing data so cost can be grouped by team, product, environment or cost centre.
   4. 4Tagging policyA short written agreement on required tag keys, allowed values, who owns each list, where tags are applied, how compliance is measured and what happens to…
   5. 5Tagging policy templateA starting template with five required keys, their allowed values, and how the policy is applied and measured.
   6. 6Cost allocation tag activationTags show in AWS cost tools only after the management account activates them as cost allocation tags; changes can take 24 hours.
   7. 7Untaggable and shared spendCost that cannot carry your tags: support, taxes, some data transfer, marketplace charges, centrally bought commitments and shared platforms.
   8. 8Billing queries in SQLSQL over a billing export answers what the console cannot: cost by tag and service, top resources, week-on-week change.

   8 in this chapterOpen this chapter
3. Allocation, showback and unit costsTurning a tagged bill into numbers each team owns: structure first, shared cost splits, showback and chargeback, unit economics formulas and reports for each audience.9 conceptsOpens with credits
4. Rate optimisation: commitments and spotPaying less for the same usage: how commitments work, coverage, utilisation and break-even, each provider's discount programmes, spot capacity and how to manage commitments over time.9 conceptsOpens with credits
5. Usage optimisationUsing less: rightsizing, recommendations, idle and orphaned resources, schedules, storage tiers, data transfer, Kubernetes cost and logs, with a savings levers checklist.11 conceptsOpens with credits
6. Forecasting, budgets and anomaliesSeeing spend coming: forecast methods, budgets and their limits, anomaly detection, routing alerts to owners and a runbook for investigating a spike.6 conceptsOpens with credits
7. AI and GPU spendHow AI usage is billed and controlled: tokens, caching, batch, model choice, provisioned capacity, GPU utilisation and capacity, unit cost and allocation.9 conceptsOpens with credits
8. The FinOps Framework and FOCUSThe FinOps Foundation's shared language (https://www.finops.org/framework/) and the FOCUS billing specification (https://focus.finops.org/).9 conceptsOpens with credits
9. Working with finance and a FinOps careerFinance terms, month-end, the monthly cost review and its checklist, getting engineers to act, roles, certification, the 2026 job market and a portfolio.10 conceptsOpens with credits
10. 10Glossary, A to ZEvery concept in the sheet and the smaller terms it uses, in one list.121 terms

Read the bill, cut waste, forecast spend.