Billing, Pricing and Support

File Pillars of Cost Optimization

• Right Size - Provision what you need
• Increase Elasticity - Meet dynamic needs and spikes
• Pick Right Pricing Model - Choose reserved or etc as needed
• Match Usage to Storage Cost - Choose right the storage class and performance.
• Measure and Monitoring - Measure, Monitor via Tagging. Optimize where possible.

TCO - Total Cost of Ownership

• Hardware and Software Acquisition
• Management and Support
• Communication
• End-user Expenses
• Downtime, Training and others

AWS is easier to measure the cost.

Pricing Calculator - Estimates

• Ability to create estimates of cost
• Steps:
  • Choose Service
  • Choose Region
  • Quick Estimate / Advanced Estimate
  • Specific information about the services.
• Save and share estimates or create groups of services for estimates.

Billing Dashboard

• Gives detailed cost for each AWS Service
• Credits can be obtained from Training, Non-private Organizations etc.

Cost Explorer

• Main tool to gather information about all costs and analyze usage in your environment.
• Deeper insight into the costs, trends, hunt down the max cost drivers
• Base tool is free, but API requests are charged per request.
• Hourly view is also payable as it requires more granular data.
• Possible to create and download reports.

Usage Report - CUR

• Needs to be enabled, by default its disabled.
• Choose S3 bucket where the CUR file lands
• Choose granularity
• Data Integration to read it such as - Athena (.parequet), Redshift+Quickshift (.csv)
• Reports are updated between 1 - 3 times per day.
• Cost Allocation Tags needs to be activated, once activated both 'User-defined cost allocation tags' and 'AWS-generated cost allocation tags' can be used in the cost explorer.

AWS Budget

• Automatic Notification and Actions when set thresholds are hit.
• Types:
  • Cost
  • Usage
  • Reservation Budget
  • Saving Plan Budget
• Actions can be automatic or via workflow approvals
• Actions be be targeted via IAM policies, SCP policies or directly shut off RDS/EC2.

Tagging

• Key, Value pairs
• Should be used groups resources for various business needs.
• CUR and Cost Explorer can make use of tags explicitly. This has to be done
• Tags can be updated using: Service Console, AWS CLI and AWS Tag Editor.
• Keep tagging simple and not overdo.
• Best to use pre-defined tags rather than make them up on the fly.
• Setup policies where new resources can't be launched without tags
• Do regular review of tags.

Amazon Support Services