AWS Cost Control

AWS Cost Control

Status: GA | Audience: Customers and partners | Owner: SoftwareOne BI & Data Solutions

A FinOps platform for managing, optimizing, and monitoring AWS cloud spend part of the Cloud Cost Control (CCC) suite from SoftwareOne (formerly Crayon). The product reads your AWS billing and consumption data across one or many accounts, transforms it to the FOCUS standard (the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification from the FinOps Foundation), and produces a Power BI report covering cost analysis, optimization opportunities, and forecasting.

The platform is built FOCUS-native. Cost data lands in a schema that follows the FinOps Foundation's open specification, which means the reporting layer treats AWS spend the same way it treats Azure or GCP spend same column names, same units, same definitions. If your team cares about vendor-neutral FinOps practices or runs in more than one cloud, that consistency is what makes everything else in the platform work.

Most customers identify substantial monthly AWS savings within the first 90 days. Optimization opportunities cluster around Reserved Instance and Savings Plan utilization, EC2 rightsizing, unused resource cleanup, and forecasting for budget planning.

On this page

• What it does

• Who it's for

• The report pages

• Multi-account architecture and access

• FOCUS the FinOps Foundation standard

• Multi-currency support

• What we need to onboard you

• Known limitations

• FAQ

• Offboarding

• Support

What it does

AWS Cost Control connects to your AWS accounts via cross-account role assumption (STS AssumeRole) and calls the AWS Cost Explorer APIs to pull detailed cost, usage, and recommendation data. That data is transformed to the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS) standard and stored in Azure SQL, then surfaced through a Power BI report.

The optimization categories surfaced by the platform:

• Reserved Instance purchase recommendations with ROI calculations and break-even analysis, plus realized savings tracking for existing reservations

• Savings Plan purchase recommendations with commitment analysis

• EC2 rightsizing recommendations based on actual instance utilization patterns

• Unused resources across EC2, EBS, S3, ENIs, Elastic IPs, and EBS snapshots

• ML-based cost forecasting via AWS Cost Explorer's forecasting API

• Month-to-date variance tracking against the previous month

The product is read-only. Recommendations come out of the platform; your team makes the actual changes in the AWS console.

Who it's for

The platform makes sense for customers running AWS at scale typically organizations with multiple accounts under an AWS Organization, mixed workloads across compute and storage, and meaningful annual AWS spend. The multi-account architecture is a particular strength: if you have ten accounts and want consolidated cost visibility plus per-account optimization recommendations, this is the kind of problem the product was built for.

The people who use it day-to-day are FinOps practitioners running monthly optimization reviews, cloud architects evaluating commitment purchases, finance teams handling chargeback, and platform engineering teams trying to keep resource sprawl in check.

The report pages

The product is delivered as a Power BI report. Every page shares a header bar showing key metrics (billed cost over the trailing period, realized savings, percentage, and last-refresh timestamp) and a right-side filter panel for currency, time period, account, sub-account, service category, region, and resource tags.

1. Cost Overview

The landing page. Three views of your AWS spend over the last 12 months: a trend line of billed cost and realized savings by month, a horizontal bar chart of cost by sub-account, and a stacked bar chart of cost by resource category (Third Party Software, Compute, AI and Machine Learning, Databases, Analytics, Networking, Management and Governance, Support, Other, Security). A geographic map overlay shows cost distribution by AWS region.

Realized savings percentages are shown inline on each monthly data point, so you can see at a glance whether your optimization actions are translating into bill reductions.

2. Realized Savings

The dedicated view for tracking savings already achieved through commitments. A side-by-side bar chart compares contracted cost (what you committed to) against billed cost (what you actually paid), with the realized savings percentage labeled on each month. Below the chart, a detailed commitments table lists every active Reserved Instance and Savings Plan with its category, type, name, and the FOCUS CommitmentDiscountId ARN, alongside the realized savings amount.

This is the page customers send to their finance teams to demonstrate that the commitment portfolio is delivering on its expected return.

3. Cost Details

Drill-down view for understanding where the money is going. Top 10 service categories by billed cost, trend of total billed cost by month, top 10 sub-accounts by billed cost, plus a flat resource-level table listing every Kafka cluster, RDS instance, NAT gateway, EKS cluster, EBS volume, and other resource with its full ARN and individual cost.

The resource table is what platform engineers use when finance asks "what is this Kafka cluster costing us." Each row maps a FOCUS ResourceId to its billed cost, so the lineage from sub-account to resource is direct.

4. Cost Explorer

A pivot view of cost by sub-account and month. Each row is a sub-account; each column is a month; the values are billed cost. Sub-accounts can be expanded to reveal further breakdown by service category, region, or other dimensions (controlled by the "Slice By" filter). This is the page for ad-hoc analysis when none of the other pages quite answers the question being asked.

5. Current Month Overview

A variance analysis page comparing the current month to the previous month at the same point in time. A sub-account level table shows MTD (month-to-date) cost, PMTD (previous month-to-date) cost, dollar variance, and percentage variance for each sub-account. A side-by-side bar chart visualizes PMTD versus MTD at the total level. A cumulative cost-per-day line chart overlays the current month against the previous month.

Negative variance percentages flag where spending is below the previous month's pace; positive flags where it's running hot. The slice-by control lets you cut the comparison by sub-account, service category, service name, continent, or region.

6. Cost Forecast

ML-based forecasting via AWS Cost Explorer's GetCostForecast API. A monthly bar chart shows realized billed cost for historical months and forecasted cost for the next two months (or longer, configurable). A second chart breaks the forecasted amount down by sub-account.

The forecasting is most reliable for the next 30–60 days on stable workloads. The page is useful for finance teams projecting next quarter's bill, but the further out the forecast goes, the more it should be treated as directional rather than committed.

7. Commitments Summary

The optimization recommendations dashboard. A four-bar waterfall shows the path from current 30-day cost through right-sizing savings, commitment savings, to potential cost.

Three breakdowns rank where the opportunities are: potential commitment savings by sub-account (split between Reservations and Savings Plans), potential right-sizing savings by sub-account, and potential monthly cost by sub-account with the most savings potential.

Configurable filters control the recommendation logic commitment lookback period (7, 30, or 60 days), term (12 or 36 months), payment options (All Upfront, Partial Upfront, No Upfront), and commitment preference (Prefer Reservation or Prefer Savings Plan).

8. Commitments Detail and Break-even

The execution-ready view of the commitments recommendation. A break-even analysis chart plots commitment cost versus on-demand cost over a 12-month projection, with the break-even month highlighted (typically 7–9 months for stable workloads). The PAYG (pay-as-you-go) projected cost and commitment cost are shown side by side.

The recommendation table lists every proposed commitment with sub-account, type (Reservation or Savings Plan), payment option, item family and item (e.g., db.t3.micro, t3.small, COMPUTE_SP), region, quantity, monthly savings, savings percentage, and break-even months.

9. Right-sizing

EC2 rightsizing recommendations. A potential-cost-by-instance chart visualizes current versus right-sized cost. Summary metrics show current instance cost, right-sized cost, and monthly savings. The detail table lists every flagged instance with its sub-account, resource ID, current SKU, current cost, potential SKU, potential cost, target memory, monthly savings, and savings percentage.

The current-to-target SKU mapping gives operations teams a concrete plan to act on without further interpretation.

10. Dashboard Configuration

A simple settings page where the customer chooses their reporting currency and whether to show the currency code in chart data labels. The choice flows through every other page in the report.

Multi-account architecture and access

The platform is designed for AWS Organizations. Access is granted by deploying a cross-account IAM role (CrayonFinOpsRole) in each in-scope account. The platform assumes that role via AWS STS, with short-lived 1-hour credentials, to call the Cost Explorer APIs. No long-lived access keys are stored anywhere.

Practically, this means:

• You control which accounts are in scope by which accounts have the role deployed

• You can revoke access at any time by deleting the role

• The role has only the read permissions required for Cost Explorer and resource inventory APIs no write access to any resource

For customers with hundreds of accounts, the role can be deployed via AWS Organizations service control policies or CloudFormation StackSets, which is the recommended approach at scale.

All cost data is presented at the sub-account level by default. The hierarchy is preserved from your AWS Organization payer account at the top, member accounts as sub-accounts so chargeback can happen at any level.

FOCUS the FinOps Foundation standard

The platform is built on FOCUS (FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification), an open standard maintained by the FinOps Foundation under the Linux Foundation. FOCUS defines a consistent schema for cloud cost and usage data the same column names, units, and definitions regardless of which cloud the data originated from. AWS, Azure, GCP, Oracle Cloud, and several SaaS billing platforms publish FOCUS-aligned exports natively, and the specification continues to broaden.

We chose to build AWS Cost Control FOCUS-native rather than reporting directly on AWS's raw Cost and Usage Report format. That choice has practical consequences for customers.

Your FinOps team doesn't have to learn AWS-specific billing semantics, then Azure-specific semantics, then GCP-specific semantics. They learn FOCUS once. Charges, amortization, commitment discounts, and the blended versus unblended cost treatment all get normalized into a single model.

Cross-cloud comparability comes for free. The same FOCUS dimensions BilledCost, EffectiveCost, ResourceId, ChargeType, CommitmentDiscountId, ServiceCategory, and the rest apply consistently across AWS, Azure, and GCP. Running comparative analysis across clouds works without a custom ETL project. The report includes a reference page mapping each FOCUS dimension to its underlying AWS, Azure, and GCP source field, so it's transparent how the normalization is being done.

If your team is pursuing FinOps Certified Practitioner credentials or building practice maturity against the FinOps Foundation's published framework, the data your reporting layer exposes is already in the format the practitioner ecosystem assumes.

FOCUS also abstracts the well-known awkwardness of AWS billing. The platform reports BilledCost as the FOCUS standard requires (mapped from AWS's NetUnblendedCost), and EffectiveCost is derived consistently across clouds. Customers don't have to interpret the difference between UnblendedCost, BlendedCost, and AmortizedCost to get a clean number that work happens once, in the ingestion pipeline, against the FOCUS specification.

The transformation happens automatically. You don't interact with raw AWS Cost and Usage Reports or Cost Explorer responses directly; what you see in Power BI is already FOCUS-aligned.

Multi-currency support

The platform supports reporting in eight currencies: AUD, CHF, DKK, EUR, GBP, NOK, SEK, and USD. Currency selection lives on the Dashboard Configuration page and flows through every chart and table in the report. You can also toggle whether to show the currency code (e.g., "USD 56.6K") inline in data labels, or hide it for cleaner presentation when the currency is implied by context.

Currency conversion happens at the platform level using daily exchange rates, so a switch from USD to EUR doesn't require a re-fetch it just changes the display.

What we need to onboard you

AWS onboarding is different from the M365 product. Rather than a single consent click, the engagement requires deploying a cross-account IAM role into each in-scope account. The mechanics vary depending on how your AWS estate is structured.

Get in touch with your SoftwareOne account team to scope the engagement. Typical inputs we'll need:

• Customer name, country, and reporting currency (one of the eight supported)

• AWS Organization payer account ID and the list of member accounts in scope

• Method for role deployment (manual, CloudFormation StackSet, or service control policy)

• Refresh frequency (daily default for AWS, monthly available)

• Email addresses for dashboard access

For most customers, the technical setup takes a few business days once the IAM role is deployed. The first full report with meaningful trend data is typically ready within two to four weeks, since rightsizing and forecasting recommendations need a usage baseline before they're reliable.

Known limitations

A few things we want you to know going in.

No write-back to AWS. The platform never modifies your AWS estate. RI and Savings Plan purchases, rightsizing actions, and resource deletions all happen in the AWS console under your control.

Cost Explorer API charges apply. AWS charges per Cost Explorer API call. For very large organizations with hundreds of accounts, this can add up usually a small fraction of the savings identified, but worth being aware of. We optimize call patterns to minimize this where possible.

Forecasting accuracy degrades over longer horizons. AWS's ML-based forecasting is reliable for the next 1–2 months on stable workloads. Longer forecasts are useful as directional guidance, not as budget commitments.

Right-sizing currently covers EC2. EBS, RDS, and Lambda right-sizing aren't surfaced in the right-sizing page today. Cost reduction in those services flows through commitment recommendations (for RDS reservations) and unused resource detection.

No cross-cloud unified view in this product alone. AWS Cost Control covers AWS. Azure and Microsoft 365 are covered by their respective CCC modules. The unified cross-cloud view is delivered through the full CCC platform the FOCUS schema is what makes that possible, but the unified report itself is a separate deliverable.

FAQ

How does access actually work what permissions does the role have?

The CrayonFinOpsRole is deployed with read-only permissions covering the Cost Explorer APIs (cost and usage, forecasts, RI and Savings Plan recommendations, utilization, and coverage), the Organizations API (for account hierarchy), and the resource inventory APIs (for tag compliance and unused resource detection). It has no write permissions and cannot modify any AWS resource. Credentials are issued via STS for 1-hour windows.

Can we trust the break-even math enough to commit?

The break-even calculation on the Commitments page uses your actual trailing usage and AWS's published pricing, plotted as commitment cost versus on-demand cost over a 12-month projection. For stable workloads, customers typically see break-even between months 7 and 9 with All Upfront payment.

A 3-year commitment is still a 3-year commitment, though. If you're planning workload migrations or major architectural changes within that window, factor those in before clicking purchase. The platform gives you the math; the business judgment sits with you.

Does the platform handle AWS Organizations with consolidated billing?

Yes, that's the primary deployment pattern. The payer account sees consolidated cost data; member accounts contribute their usage data via the cross-account role. The sub-account hierarchy in every report page mirrors your AWS Organization structure, so chargeback reports work at any level.

What's the difference between MTD and PMTD on the Current Month Overview page?

MTD is month-to-date for the current month cost from day 1 of the current month up to the last refresh date. PMTD is previous month-to-date cost from day 1 of the previous month up to the same day-of-month as the current refresh. The comparison is apples-to-apples at the same point in the billing cycle, so a negative variance means you're tracking lower than last month at this point.

The cumulative cost-per-day chart overlays the two months as line charts, which makes spending pattern shifts visible at a glance a workload that's running hotter in the second week of the current month than it did last month, for example.

Why is Realized Savings shown separately from billed cost?

Because they answer different questions. Billed cost is what you paid AWS. Realized Savings is the additional amount you would have paid without your existing Reserved Instance and Savings Plan commitments. The percentage shows the savings rate as a share of contracted cost.

The Realized Savings page breaks it down per commitment ARN every active RI and Savings Plan with its specific contribution to the savings number so you can attribute the value precisely.

Can we filter by tags?

Yes. Every page in the report includes a Resource Tags filter that exposes the AWS-native tag keys (everything from aws:autoscaling:groupName to aws:cloudformation:stack-id to aws:createdBy and any custom tags you've applied). Filtering by tag is how customers typically isolate environments, business units, or cost centers.

Is the FOCUS implementation certified or audited?

FOCUS is an open specification, not a certification scheme there's no "FOCUS-certified" badge in the way you'd see for SOC 2 or ISO 27001. What matters in practice is whether the implementation actually conforms to the specification's column definitions. Our ingestion pipeline maps AWS Cost Explorer data to the FOCUS schema based on the FinOps Foundation's published specification, and the report includes a reference page showing exactly how each FOCUS dimension is sourced from AWS, Azure, and GCP native fields. If you have a specific FOCUS column you want to validate, we can walk through the mapping.

Does the FOCUS transformation lose any AWS-specific detail?

Some, by design. FOCUS normalizes data into a vendor-neutral schema, which means very AWS-specific concepts (like the exact mechanics of EDP discounts or Marketplace billing) may be represented in a less AWS-native way. The raw AWS Cost Explorer data is still accessible through the underlying APIs if you need it, but the standard reporting layer uses the FOCUS-aligned view. For most FinOps use cases, the FOCUS view is what you actually want.

What about AWS GovCloud or AWS China?

Commercial AWS regions are fully supported. AWS GovCloud (US) and AWS China (operated by Sinnet/NWCD) aren't currently in scope. If you have a specific requirement, let us know feasibility depends on whether the underlying APIs are accessible from our fetching infrastructure.

How often does the data refresh?

Default is daily, which aligns with AWS's billing data publication cadence. Monthly refresh is available for customers who prefer it. Cost Explorer data itself lags real-time spending by up to 24 hours, which is an AWS publication delay rather than a platform limitation.

Why is the data stored in Azure if this is an AWS product?

The CCC platform infrastructure runs on Azure across all cloud cost modules. AWS data is fetched from AWS, transformed to FOCUS, and stored in Azure SQL for unified reporting. That's part of how the cross-cloud view works at the platform level cost data from every source cloud ends up in the same FOCUS-aligned store.

Offboarding

Contact your SoftwareOne account manager or email CloudCostControl@crayon.com. Because access is granted via the CrayonFinOpsRole IAM role in each account, offboarding is straightforward: delete the role from each in-scope account and our read access is immediately revoked. We'll then clean up the downstream data on our side.

Sales Material

One-Pager

AWS_Cost_Control_one-pager.pptx

Support

Maintained by the SoftwareOne BI & Data Solutions team. This page describes the customer-facing product. For internal architecture and engineering documentation, see the CCC team space in Notion.