Data-Driven FinOps with Amazon QuickSight & Lambda Durable vs. Step Functions

It's time to meetup again 🎉! Join our AWS User Group Stuttgart meetup @ Zoi office - Stuttgart!

1st Talk: Data-Driven FinOps: Transforming Cloud Costs into Business Value with Amazon QuickSuite
As cloud footprints grow, understanding and optimizing your AWS bill can quickly become an overwhelming task. Without the right visibility, organizations often face "bill shock" or struggle to identify exactly which workloads are driving up costs.
Join us for an in-depth session on FinOps on AWS, where we will explore how to turn raw billing data into actionable insights using the open-source AWS Cloud Intelligence Dashboards (CID) framework. We will focus specifically on the CUDOS and CORA dashboards, demonstrating how they empower engineering and finance teams to make data-driven infrastructure decisions.
Beyond just looking at the visualizations in Amazon QuickSight, we will pop the hood and walk through the underlying serverless architecture that makes this reporting possible at scale.
What You Will Learn:

• The FinOps Reality: A quick primer on cloud financial management and why granular visibility is the critical first step to stopping wasted spend.
• Exploring CUDOS: How to use the foundational CUDOS dashboard to drill down into resource-level granularity, uncover usage trends, and identify anomalies.
• Actionable Optimization with CORA: How the Cost Optimization Recommended Actions (CORA) dashboard aggregates data to help you easily track rightsizing, flag idle resources, and plan Graviton migrations.
• Under the Hood (The Architecture): A technical walkthrough of the data pipeline. We will explain how AWS Data Exports, Cost and Usage Reports (CUR 2.0), Amazon S3, Amazon Athena, and Amazon QuickSight work together to process massive billing datasets.
• Deployment Best Practices: Strategies for rolling this out across a multi-account AWS Organization securely.

About the speakers:
Anna Lena - FinOps Consultant at Zoi
With a strong professional background in Classical Finance and Business Controlling, she knows exactly why "Bill Shock" keeps stakeholders up at night. Anna-Lena specializes in translating complex cloud usage into clear financial stories. She is a firm believer that FinOps isn't just about cutting costs—it's about driving accountability and mastering unit economics.
Leveraging her history in financial steering, she helps organizations move beyond static spreadsheets to build a high-performance "FinOps Engine" using Amazon QuickSight and the Cloud Intelligence Dashboards.
Firas Tayeb - DevOps Engineer specialist at Zoi

2nd Talk: Workflows as Code or Config? Lambda Durable Functions vs. Step Functions
Since re:Invent 2025, AWS offers two services for reliable, stateful multi-step workflows – and their capabilities overlap enough to make the choice non-obvious. Lambda durable functions bring orchestration directly into your application code (what developers might love), with automatic checkpointing and pause/resume for up to a year. The release of Durable Functions has created a lot of excitement among serverless developers so that it is easy to forgot that AWS Step Functions exist. Step Functions which has been around for some years - powerful but highly underrated - coordinates workflows across 200+ AWS services with a fully managed, declarative approach. Even the AWS documentation provides more a fuzzy approach when to use which service - not for the first time :)
This talk will introduce AWS Lambda Durable Functions as well as compare its code-first approach with the declarative one of Step Functions, focusing on areas and use-cases where one might be advantages compared to the other. Both services are really powerful but the details might still make a difference. Come and learn about the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches, and get some practical guidance on when to choose which service for your next serverless workflow project.
About the speaker:
Thomas Laue - Senior AWS Cloud Architect at XL2 by Audi & Capgemini

AGENDA:
18:00 Welcome and drinks 🍻
18:15 Presentations and Q&A 🤔
19:45 Food & networking 🍕🤝