Insights & Resources

AWS Blocks (public preview, June 2026): 18+ open-source TypeScript building blocks that run locally without an AWS account and deploy with zero code changes.

CUR 2.0 (generally available 2024, default for new exports in 2025) adds line-item resource IDs and Savings Plan attribution columns Athena needs for serious chargeback. A standard FinOps query pack answers top-10 services, untagged spend, and SP coverage in under 60 seconds.

On June 15, 2026 AWS made Console Private Access work without internet — VPC endpoints route 100% of browser traffic. First-party benchmark: 161 interface endpoints and ~$263/mo for a 12-service 3-AZ pilot in us-east-1.

Compute Optimizer added 32-day lookback for cyclic workloads in 2025 — critical for monthly batch jobs that looked oversized on 14-day windows. In a June 2026 audit of a $48k/mo account, rightsizing recommendations alone modeled $11k/mo savings at low performance risk.

Aurora bills instance hours plus storage plus I/O — or storage at a 125% premium with I/O bundled (I/O-Optimized). Serverless v2 at $0.12 per ACU-hour wins on variable workloads, loses on steady traffic above 4 ACU. Global Database doubles the price per secondary region plus replicated-write fees. Backtrack adds per-change-record cost most teams never factor in.

Bedrock AgentCore is metered across twelve distinct components — Runtime, Browser, Code Interpreter, Gateway, Identity, Memory (two tiers), Observability, Evaluations, Payments, Search, and the underlying model spend. Two of them drive 80% of the bill.

CloudFront bills $0.085/GB egress in North America tiered down to $0.020/GB at extreme volume, plus $0.0075–$0.0100 per 10K requests, plus origin egress. Regional price classes drop the bill 30–60% by skipping expensive geographies. Real-time logs at $0.01 per million entries surprise high-traffic sites. Lambda@Edge is dramatically more expensive than CloudFront Functions.

CloudWatch bills across ten distinct dimensions — Logs ingestion at $0.50/GB, Logs storage, custom metrics with cardinality multipliers, alarms tiered by resolution and type, dashboards at $3 each, Synthetics canary runs, RUM events, X-Ray traces, Container Insights, and cross-region replication. Logs ingestion is the largest line on most accounts.

DynamoDB on-demand bills $1.25 per million writes and $0.25 per million reads — pay-per-request convenience with no capacity planning. Provisioned at $0.00065/WCU-hour wins on steady traffic above ~50% utilization. Every GSI doubles the write cost, IA tier cuts storage 60% but adds 25% to request fees, and Global Tables compound the bill per region.

EBS is billed across six dimensions — gp3 storage at $0.08/GB-month, separate IOPS and throughput line items, io2 Block Express, snapshots at $0.05/GB-month, fast snapshot restore at $0.75/DSU-hour. Deleting an EC2 instance never stops the volume bill, and the gp2→gp3 migration is one of the cleanest 20% wins in cloud cost.

ECR storage is $0.10/GB-month — twice S3 Standard. Cross-region replication doubles or triples that. Enhanced scanning bills $0.09 per image scanned, on every push. Pull-through caches for Docker Hub and ECR Public add storage plus data-transfer-in. A 200-service organization with 10 environments and 3 regions can spend more on ECR than on the EKS clusters pulling from it.

EFS Standard is $0.30/GB-month — over 13× S3 Standard. Standard-IA is 92% cheaper at $0.025; Archive is 99% cheaper at $0.0036. Elastic Throughput (the 2024 default) bills $0.03/GB read and $0.06/GB write per transfer. Throughput mode and storage class decisions, made once at provision time, control the bill more than any usage pattern.