Data-Driven FinOps with Amazon QuickSight & AWS Backups with Control Tower

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: Mastering AWS Backups with Control Tower (Without Losing Your Mind)
Managing backups across multiple AWS accounts doesn’t have to be a mess of scripts and IAM roles. AWS Backup with Control Tower offers a centralized, automated solution. Easy to set up in theory, but the devil is in the details.

In this talk, Nora shares the hard-earned lessons from implementing centralized backups in production environments. We’ll cut through the documentation and focus on what really matters: the pitfalls you stumble over and the practices that will save you headaches.
About the speaker:
Nora is an AWS DevTools Hero and public speaker. She is a Cloud Engineer with a long-standing career in the tech industry, focusing on Cloud Computing and incorporating DevOps principles to help dev teams maintaining healthy, reliable applications. She co-hosts the AWS User Group Nürnberg and supports women devs in tech. Nora blogs at wolkencode.de, likes drawing Manga, dancing and enjoying delicious food.

AGENDA:

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