AWS reInvent 2022 is fast approaching (only two weeks away!) and I’m excited to share that I will be co-presenting with Aaron Edell and Rohit Pujari on Quicksight and the Cloud Intelligence Dashboards. Come see us on Thursday afternoon in BSI304: Optimize your AWS cost and usage with Cloud Intelligence Dashboards. I’ll be sharing the customer perspective of how…
Author: Mike Graff
I'm an IT Professional with over 25 years experience in the industry with a focus is on Designing, Implementing and Operating highly available IT Infrastructure that meets the business need. I have broad experience across the entire spectrum of IT infrastructure services: storage, compute, network and security.
Since 2016 I have been primarily focused on working with public cloud infrastructure and supporting business teams on their cloud related projects.
AWS Organizations can now update primary contact info for accounts
In a very small blog post released on Oct 25th, the AWS Organizations team released a key new feature: the ability to update the primary contact information for your member accounts. This is a huge improvement and takes away one more thing that you previously could only do logged in as root. Login in to…
Easily Query Your Cloud Inventory with Steampipe
Cloud Inventory is a Challenge Anyone who has worked with AWS for a while will be quite familiar with the difficulties of getting a complete picture of the inventory of resources in your accounts. While AWS has made some limited strides in this area with tools like the EC2 Global View and the ability to…
Build Easy Chargeback Reports using AWS Cost Categories
Introduction At my day job, we first started using public cloud back in 2015, and at the time we were really just starting to crawl with cloud financials. Our finance department was not a fan of chargeback and as a result we ended up partnering with a third party reseller to help us with…
FinOpsX
Excited to announce that I’ll be attending FinOpsX in Austin next week where I’ll be giving a lightning talk on how to use #aws Cost Categories to build a chargeback report. Expect a companion blog post on this topic next week. Looks like an interesting mix of speakers at the event and I’m looking forward to learning…
Tools to help with Accessibility and DevOps
The concept of building accessibility (AX) into a web application is something that is talked about more and more these days, but sadly often gets cut as a product gets closer to release. With CI/CD and DevOps becoming more prevalent, how can DevOps professionals ensure that accessibility is included in the process? This post will…
AWS Control Tower can finally use your existing core accounts!
Recently (May 16th, 2022), AWS made a small announcement related to AWS Control Tower that will be huge for my AWS environment and probably for many others as well. Namely, that you can now use customer provided core accounts when implementing Control Tower. Background AWS Control Tower is a great solution if you are setting…
Using AWS Cost Explorer for Forecasting
Introduction One constant topic that comes up whenever discussing cloud costs with my counterparts in Finance is the notion of forecasting. Finance people love to forecast and it’s a big part of their job. However, forecasting AWS spend is notoriously difficult for several reasons: The fact that cloud costs are consumption based and thus highly…
Implementing CUDOS for an Enterprise – Part 2: Filtering Data using Row Level Security
Introduction In my first post on the CUDOS solution, I showed you how you can implement implement SSO access to CUDOS using AWS Single Sign-on service. Leveraging this capability you can enable users to sign in to QuickSight using their corporate credentials and avoid having to give them full access to the AWS console. Now…
Implementing CUDOS Cost Intelligence Dashboards for an Enterprise
Part 1 – Deployment and SSO Integration At my day job I recently led a project to move away from CloudHealth for cost reporting and implement some new tools to replace the functionality of CloudHealth. CloudHealth is a great tool but my company no longer wanted to pay a percentage of our spend just to…