Managing Inventory

With the right account structure in place, we can begin to work on managing Amazon Web Services (AWS) resources—those items that actually contribute to your costs. We will look at several tools that AWS provides that help you see the resources you have running within your accounts. These resources, plus your defined financial operations (FinOps) processes, make up your inventory.

We will then look at ways to manage your inventory with native AWS tools and explore the necessity of tags and how they increase visibility into your inventory. Cost optimization is not possible when you don’t know what you have. Hence, this chapter provides you with the knowledge and tools needed to better manage your inventory.

In this chapter, we’re going to cover the following main topics:

• Tracking your AWS resources
• Establishing a tagging strategy
• Grouping tags with AWS Cost Categories