Answers generated from Webex transcript and chat interactions
Q: What are the types of surprise costs that your clients have found when using the solution?
A: It’s really about removing surprises. The solution helps business constituents and budget owners easily answer questions about their spending, understand when new workloads or spending is occurring, and approve or dispute charges weekly. Amazon Q helps drive acceptance of spending. The goal is to remove any surprises around costs.
Q: Do the deployed scripts only work in a fresh environment? Can you use the same scripts or APIs to redeploy?
A: You can deploy to an existing environment, not just a fresh one. The topic IDs and dashboard IDs will be the same when deploying to a second environment, with only the account number being different. You can take the UAT environment IDs and deploy them to production, knowing the account ID will keep it unique.
Q: Is the front end in the demo in QuickSight directly or custom leveraging?
A: It’s using the Q&A embedding with user-based authentication. There is custom code to store topic IDs per role and render the correct topic for each user based on their role.
Q: Do Q topics work the same with direct query datasets?
A: No, you have to load data into SPICE. SPICE is very powerful in this use case as you want data as close to the model as possible for fast querying. The recommendation is to push as much data into SPICE as you can for the best user experience.
Q: Is this Q available in Europe?
A: Yes, anywhere Q&A is available in QuickSight, as long as QuickSight is available in your region.
Q: Can this Q be interacted with FOCUS dashboard?
A: FOCUS support will likely be available around July. Once FOCUS data sources are added to the product, there will be similar Q&A functionality as with the Cost and Usage Report data. It will require updating queries but shouldn’t be too difficult to implement.
Q: Is there any possibility to automatically take calculated fields from analyses and add them to a Q topic in a batch?
A: Yes, this is possible. You can export the calculated fields from existing analyses as JSON, then use that JSON to import the fields into the targeted topic using import scripts. The specific process wasn’t detailed, but it involves working with the JSON exports/imports rather than using the console.
Q: From July this year Q is widely available for all regions related to FOCUS. Is that correct? Can we try?
A: Everything is available now. Finops Center has a free 30-day version and the Q framework is free. Since it’s installed in your AWS environment, you’d be responsible for the underlying consumption costs.
Q: How can they embed this into their dashboard usage with the most ease?
A: Currently it’s not possible to take an existing dashboard and enable Q&A embedding for a web application. The “Enable Q&A” option when sharing a dashboard does not create a topic ID that can be embedded. As of now, embedding Q&A into an existing dashboard is not an available capability.