AWS Cloud Financial Management training (Skill Builder)

What it is

AWS publishes a set of free, self-paced digital courses on Cloud Financial Management (CFM), AWS's name for FinOps, on AWS Skill Builder. Each course is roughly an hour. To find them, sign in to Skill Builder and search for "Cloud Financial Management".

The courses

• Cloud Financial Management: FinOps fundamentals and strategies (Part I): evaluating and managing cloud investment, migration business cases, forecasting and budgeting, cost reporting and visualisation, and cost governance.
• Cloud Financial Management: FinOps fundamentals and strategies (Part II): cost optimisation, cost allocation and AWS pricing strategies.
• Cost Optimization Solutions for FinOps (Part I): technical cost optimisation for compute (EC2, Lambda), storage (S3, EFS, EBS) and databases.
• Cost Optimization Solutions for FinOps (Part II): data transfer, networking, analytics and containers.
• Cloud Financial Management: FinOps for GenAI: optimising costs for generative AI services such as Amazon Bedrock and SageMaker.

AWS also runs a paid, instructor-led course called AWS Cloud Financial Management for Builders for those who want a classroom version.

Why take them

They teach FinOps in AWS's own terms and tools: Cost Explorer, cost allocation tags, AWS Budgets, Savings Plans, Compute Optimizer and the Cost and Usage Report. That vocabulary is what you meet in AWS-heavy jobs. The GenAI course is one of the few free, official treatments of AI spend.

How to use them well

Take Part I before the roadmap's visibility stages and the Cost Optimization courses before the usage optimisation stage. After each course, open your own account and find every tool it named. Keep a note of the ones that need activating (tags, exports) and do that the same day.

Prerequisites and time

Basic AWS knowledge, roughly Cloud Practitioner level. Five hours for the whole set.

Free or paid

The digital courses are free with a Skill Builder account.

Best for: learners on the AWS path of the FinOps roadmap who want the official version of each idea.