In this seventeen-course curriculum, you learn about cloud business value and how to build a business case for a workload migration. You also discover Cloud Financial Management (CFM) best practices, including how to measure, optimize, and plan cloud usage, and how finance teams can innovate with Amazon Web Services (AWS). You learn how to report, monitor, and allocate your cloud costs. You gain technical and pricing-model based cost optimization strategies, find out how to forecast cloud costs, and learn about organizational and governance-based best practices that help drive cost-efficient usage of AWS. You also discover ways to innovate within your finance organization by understanding various solutions available to your firm.

• Curriculum level: Fundamental
• Duration: 17 hours

Activities

This curriculum includes presentations and assessments.

Curriculum objectives

In this curriculum, you will learn to:

• Explain the four value areas where you can realize benefits when using AWS.
• Assemble a business case that includes quantifying business value.
• Quantify migration costs and discover AWS programs available to reduce migration costs.
• Use AWS tools to report, monitor, allocate, optimize, and plan your AWS spend.
• Use technical optimizations and commitment-based purchase options to reduce and avoid AWS costs.
• Estimate costs associated with current and future cloud workloads.
• Build a CFM practice, and implement financial governance and controls.
• Drive finance organization innovation with AWS and AWS Partner solutions.

Intended audience

This curriculum is intended for:

• Chief financial officers
• Chief accounting officers
• Financial controllers
• Financial planning and analysis managers
• Procurement managers
• Financial analysts
• Accounts payable
• CFM/FinOps leaders
• Cloud infrastructure engineers
• Cloud application engineers
• Anyone curious about cloud business value and CFM

We recommend that attendees of this curriculum have taken:

AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials

AWS Cloud Essentials for Business Leaders

Role Based Recommendations

Although we recommend taking all of the courses in this curriculum, this table maps individual courses to specific finance team personas. Please review to see what the recommended courses are for your specific finance role, as you plan your learning journey for the AWS Cloud for Finance Professionals curriculum.

Curriculum Outline

Course 1: Curriculum Overview

• Suggested prerequisites
• Curriculum objectives
• Curriculum introduction

Course 2: Introduction: Cloud Computing and AWS

• The importance of cloud computing and AWS
• AWS and key AWS services
• How security works on AWS
• How other customers have succeeded with AWS

Course 3: Introduction: Cloud Business Value

• Cloud business value
• The AWS Cloud Value Framework
• The AWS Cloud Value benchmarking study

Course 4: Introduction: Evaluating a Cloud Migration Decision

• The AWS business case methodology
• Discovering and mapping current IT estate to AWS resources
• Calculating total cost of ownership
• Quantifying business value
• Estimating and reducing migration costs

Course 5: Introduction: Understanding AWS Cloud Financial Management

• How technology consumption changes with AWS Cloud
• Why AWS CFM is important
• What AWS CFM is all about

Course 6: Measurement and Accountability: Cost Reporting and Monitoring

• The importance of cost visibility
• Tools that provide cost visibility
• Tools for cost monitoring
• Establishing organizational cost visibility

Course 7: Measurement and Accountability: Cost Allocation Building Blocks

• The importance of cost allocation
• Cost allocation building blocks
• Account and tagging strategies

Course 8: Measurement and Accountability: Cost Allocation Models

• The importance of cost allocation
• Cost allocation models
• Allocating AWS costs
• Establishing cost accountability

Course 9: Measurement and Accountability: Cloud Performance Indicators

• The importance of key performance indicators (KPIs)
• Measuring efficiency in a cloud environment
• Measuring efficient KPIs through an AWS customer example

Course 10: Cost Optimization: Cost-Aware Cloud Consumption

• The importance of cost awareness when you build in the AWS Cloud
• What it means to be Well-Architected
• AWS pricing models
• Cost awareness for builders

Course 11: Cost Optimization: Optimize Cloud Usage

• Usage-based technical cost optimization
• Technical cost optimizations

Course 12: Cost Optimization: Commitment-Based Purchase Options

• The importance of commitment-based purchase options
• Savings Plans and Reserved Instances
• Amazon CloudFront savings bundles
• A commitment-based purchase option process

Course 13: Planning and Forecasting: Estimating cloud costs

• The importance of estimating cloud costs
• How to estimate cloud workload costs
• A prescriptive cloud cost estimation process
• Estimating costs associated with large cloud migrations

Course 14: Planning and Forecasting: Cloud Budgeting and Forecasting

• The importance of cloud budgeting and forecasting
• Methodologies for cloud spend forecasting
• Improving cloud spend predictability
• Establishing a cloud budgeting and forecasting process

Course 15: Cloud Financial Operations: Organizational Change for AWS Cloud Financial Management

• The importance of organizational change for AWS CFM
• New cloud-related responsibilities as a finance professional
• Different organizational models for CFM
• Establishing a cost-aware organizational culture

Course 16: Cloud Financial Operations: Cloud Financial Governance and Controls

• The importance of cloud financial governance and controls
• Business process-based governance
• Automation-based governance using AWS

Course 17: Innovation: Finance Innovation with AWS

• Principles of finance transformation
• Key finance innovation activities
• Finance innovation solutions and use cases
• Next steps to identify innovation opportunities for your finance organization