AWS is finally making planning for cloud deployments less of a guessing game for enterprise teams.

The cloud service provider has launched a new planning tool named Capabilities by Region, which provides visibility into the availability of services, tools, and features, including AWS CloudFormation resources, across its global regions.

This visibility is critical to enterprises for planning and successfully deploying workloads in the cloud, and without it could lead to fallouts ranging from spiralling operational expenses and service outages to compliance breaches, analysts say.

“Enterprises struggle with regional service parity. They often discover gaps late in deployment, which causes delays and costly rework. This capability with authoritative, forward-looking visibility into service availability will help address such issues,” Charlie Dai, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, said.

Dai was referring to the tool’s capability that shows whether a particular service or feature is planned for a region or not.

AWS’s ability to showcase planned service and feature expansions is a key differentiator from rival offerings, said Pareekh Jain, principal analyst with Pareekh Consulting.

While Microsoft Azure’s Product Availability by Region portal lists services by geography, it lacks forward-looking timelines and the unified API comparability that AWS’s Capabilities by Region delivers, Jain noted.

Region Picker, which is a similar offering from Google, too, falls short on granular, future-facing service or API roadmaps and focuses on passing information that would help enterprises optimize for price, carbon footprint, and latency.

According to Jain, Capabilities by Region can help enterprises avoid overspending in the cloud, which is a widespread and growing concern.

Industry estimates show that nearly 30% of most cloud budgets are wasted due to underutilized resources or poor visibility into resources, Jain added.

Unlike AWS CloudFormation and the AWS Cost Explorer, which are other tools related to planning and management of cloud deployments and are accessible via the AWS Management Console, AWS’s Capabilities by Region tool can be accessed via its Builder Center — an AWS products and services-related community portal targeted at cloud architects and developers.

Analysts say the new tool has been deliberately placed outside the AWS Management Console to avoid disruptions to live deployments.

“It is safer for non-admins/partners, and avoids touching live environments. Keeping it outside the Console lowers barriers to entry as no AWS account is needed,” Jain said. AWS is also making all the data inside Capabilities by Region accessible through the AWS Knowledge MCP Server, which will provide developers an avenue to automate cloud planning or get recommendations for cloud deployments via generative AI assistants.