Title

AWS re:Invent 2023 - Interactive cost reporting with Amazon QuickSight (BSI207)

Summary

Rohit Bajori, Bowen Wong, and Yuri Prikhodko presented on AWS cost management and the integration of Amazon QuickSight for interactive cost reporting.
They discussed common challenges customers face in managing AWS costs, such as getting engineering teams to take action, reaching unit economics, and creating cloud financial awareness across organizations.
The speakers highlighted the importance of financial awareness to variable spend, visibility for engineering teams, and the need for business users to tie costs to overall business value.
Amazon QuickSight was introduced as a tool that provides interactive dashboards, reports, and data-driven narratives, with new generative BI capabilities and serverless architecture.
A new cost and usage dashboard powered by QuickSight was announced, which can be provisioned directly from the AWS billing and cost management console.
The dashboard offers out-of-the-box insights, customization options, and the ability to share across the organization securely.
Bowen demonstrated how to create and configure the new dashboard, while Yuri showcased its features, including insights into savings, month-over-month trends, database summaries, and data transfer summaries.
The session concluded with a live demonstration of how to customize the dashboard to create personalized visuals and insights.

The integration of QuickSight with AWS billing and cost management simplifies the process of creating interactive cost reports, reducing the need for engineering resources and complex data pipelines.
The new cost and usage dashboard is designed to address the needs of both technical and business users, providing a single-pane view of costs, usage, and savings.
The dashboard's ability to combine AWS cost data with business metrics allows for more informed decision-making and better alignment of cloud spend with business objectives.
QuickSight's serverless architecture and pay-as-you-go pricing model make it an attractive option for organizations looking to scale their BI capabilities without incurring significant upfront costs.
The session highlighted AWS's commitment to helping customers optimize their cloud spend through better visibility and actionable insights, which is critical for organizations as they scale and their cloud usage becomes more complex.