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AWS CloudTrail Pricing: Why Data Events Drive the Bill
Cost Optimization & FinOps
5 min

AWS CloudTrail Pricing: Why Data Events Drive the Bill

Management events are free for the first trail. Data events bill $0.10 per 100K, and on a busy S3 bucket that lands at thousands per month. CloudTrail Lake is $0.75/GB ingested with one-year extendable retention ($0.023/GB-month after year one), or $2.50/GB with seven years of retention included. Insights events analyze every management event for anomalies at $0.35/100K. Wildcard data-event selectors are the usual source of the overspend.

Kevin W.
Post-Migration Optimization and the FinOps Handoff (2026): The First 30 Days After Cutover Decide Your Run-Rate
Cost Optimization & FinOps
4 min

Post-Migration Optimization and the FinOps Handoff (2026): The First 30 Days After Cutover Decide Your Run-Rate

A lift-and-shift migration copies on-prem specs sized for peak plus headroom, then the migration partner rolls off and nobody owns the bill. The waste is predictable: 30 to 60% of cost untagged, over-provisioned EC2/RDS, idle NAT Gateways and orphaned EBS, and commitments bought on top of all of it. This is the explicit migration-to-FinOps handoff: owner first, visibility second, right-size before you commit. It comes with a 30-day checklist and an optimization-backlog CSV.

Kevin W.
AWS Service Announcements: June 2026 Roundup
AWS News
9 min

AWS Service Announcements: June 2026 Roundup

June 2026 AWS announcements: Console Private Access without internet (June 15), EC2 M9g/M9gd Graviton5 GA, Claude Fable 5 GA, FinOps Agent preview, Cost Explorer Analyze with Amazon Q, Bedrock console redesign, Cognito multi-Region replication, GPT-5.4 in GovCloud. Plus June 30 lifecycle updates for Bedrock Agents Classic, Q Business, and Kendra.

FactualMinds Team
AWS Tagging, Chargeback, and FinOps Ownership (2026): Tag Policy vs SCP, the Untaggable 21%, and Splitting Shared Cost Without a Spreadsheet War
Cost Optimization & FinOps
6 min

AWS Tagging, Chargeback, and FinOps Ownership (2026): Tag Policy vs SCP, the Untaggable 21%, and Splitting Shared Cost Without a Spreadsheet War

Tag policies report; only an SCP prevents untagged spend. And ~21% of a typical bill (egress, inter-AZ transfer, Enterprise Support, shared platform services) carries no tag any tool can read. The post covers the two-layer enforcement model, the Cost Categories split-charge rules that replace the monthly allocation spreadsheet, and why you show back before you charge back.

Kevin W.
Reserved Instances vs Savings Plans on AWS (2026): The Three-Way Choice, the 22-Month Break-Even, and When to Skip Commitment Entirely
Cost Optimization & FinOps
8 min

Reserved Instances vs Savings Plans on AWS (2026): The Three-Way Choice, the 22-Month Break-Even, and When to Skip Commitment Entirely

Most "RI vs Savings Plan" content treats them as peers. In mid-2026 they are not. A 3-year All-Upfront Compute Savings Plan saves a composite ~$60k/mo SaaS roughly $864k over 3 years vs a 1-year No-Upfront plan, but breaks even at ~22 months and locks instance-family flexibility. Buy the wrong commitment and a Graviton migration strands the discount. This post gives the decision tree we use.

Kevin W.

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