AWS Cost Management

What is AWS Cost Management?

Let us get started by exploring what is AWS Cost Management in detail. We define AWS Cost Management as a console having features that can be utilized for budgeting methods as well as forecasting costs to optimize the pricing for reducing the overall AWS bill. It is recommended to utilize the AWS Billing console resources for managing the ongoing payments and using the AWS Cost Management console resources for optimizing future costs.

With the AWS Cost Management console and the Billing console, you can do the following tasks.

AWS Cost Explorer

AWS Cost Management offers an AWS service called AWS Cost Explorer. It is a tool that offers the viewing and analyzing of the costs incurred and data usage. You can use the main graph, the AWS Cost Explorer cost incurred and usage reports, or the Cost Explorer RI( Reserved Instance) reports for exploring the data usage and cost incurred. Data can be viewed for up to the last 12 months, along with forecasts about how much is likely to be spent in the coming 12 months, along with getting specified customized recommendations on how these costs can be minimized with which Reserved Instances to buy.

With AWS Cost Explorer you can easily identify areas where further inquiry is needed and view trends to better understand the costs fetting incurred. The viewing from the AWS Cost Explorer is free of charge from the user interface or can also be done programmatically via the Cost Explorer API. The cost incurred for each paginated API request is $0.01. It's recommended to disable AWS Cost Explorer after each use. The dataset that AWS Cost Explorer utilizes is the same which is used for generating the AWS Cost and Usage Reports as well as the detailed billing reports. These reports can also be downloaded for future reference as a comma-separated value (CSV) file. For getting, a fresh head starts on customizing the view that fits your requirements, the AWS Cost Explorer offers preconfigured views displaying at-a-glance information about the data cost trends.

Once you get started with AWS Cost Explorer, AWS helps to prepare the initial data where everything related to the costs for the current month along with the last 12 months is registered and the calculation for the coming 12 months is also taken up. As we know, the current month's data is only available for 24 hours while the remaining data takes a few days longer. The data refresh rate is at least once every 24 hours. in the AWS Cost Explorer. AWS Cost Explorer displays up to 12 months of historical data, the current month, and the next 2 months of forecasted costs.

AWS Budgets

With the AWS Budgets, you can set custom budgets that shall generate an alert notification when the cost incurred or data usage exceeds (or even the forecasted usage data cost exceeds) variants of the budgeted amount. To set the RI utilization and the coverage targets for receiving the notifications scenario where the utilization drops below the threshold that is specified, you can implement it too with eth AWS Budgets. RI notifications are supported by AWS EC2, AWS RDS, AWS Redshift, and AWS ElastiCache reservations. The tracking of the budgets is at the monthly, quarterly, or yearly level, or you can even customize the start and end dates as per the requirements. The budgets can be refined to track costs liked with various dimensions, like AWS service, associated accounts, tags, and others. These budget notifications are sent either through email and/or AWS Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic. All this can be created and tracked from the AWS Budgets dashboard or via the AWS Budgets API.

AWS Budgets Reports

Another interesting AWS service offered by AWS cost management is the AWS Budgets, which helps you to configure a report for monitoring the performance of the existing budgets on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis and can also deliver this report to up to 50 emails addresses for each standalone account or AWS Organizations management account. Every AWS budget report costs around $.01 USD for each report that is delivered irrespective of the number of recipients that shall be receiving the budget report.

To control access to budgets by member accounts, you can utilize the consolidated billing in a company where you can own the management account, and use the IAM policies to control. It is known that owners of member accounts are capable of creating their budgets whereas they can't create or modify the budgets for other users by default. To allows users to access the build, modify, delete, or read the budget you need to use IAM for the management account.

AWS Cost Anomaly Detection

While talking about the AWS Cost management service, it becomes important to look for any anatomy which is being hosted on the customer. With the use of advanced machine learning for continuously monitoring the cost incurred and data usage, AWS offers AWS Cost Anomaly Detection to accurately detect any unusual spending. Once the billing data is processed, the AWS Cost Anomaly Detection will help to run approximately three times a day. This might also cause a slight delay in receiving alerts if nay. The data from the AWS Cost Explorer is utilized by the AWS Cost Anomaly Detection which can cause a delay of up to 24 hours which causes a delay in the detection of an anomaly after a usage occurs too. For any new service subscription, appropriate 10 days of historical service usage data are required before anomalies can start getting detected for the service.

The following benefits can be unleashed by implementing the AWS Cost Anomaly Detection:

• Receiving alert notifications individually in the aggregated reports. This can be over an email or via an AWS SNS topic.
• You can simply create an AWS Chatbot configuration for receiving notifications via an AWS SNS topic which maps the AWS SNS topic to an interactive Channel say, Slack channel, or an AWS Chime chat room.
• Analysing and evaluating the anonymous spend patterns via the implementation of machine learning methods which can help to minimize any false positive alerts. These benefits could be used for evaluating any weekly or monthly seasonality along with organic growth.
• The root cause of the anomaly can also be analyzed and determined for any suspicious AWS account, service, Region, or data usage type which is leading to the anomaly cost increase.
• You can configure how the costs can be evaluated. You can choose to validate if you want to analyze all of the AWS services independently or by any self-member accounts, cost allocation tags, or cost categories.

AWS Application Cost Profiler

The ability which offers you to conveniently track the consumption of shared AWS resources utilized by software applications along with the report granular cost breakdown across tenant base, AWS offers its service called AWS Application Cost Profiler. With this service, the users can get a better understanding of profitability as well as customization of the pricing strategies for the end consumers. By sharing the AWS resources the users can achieve economies of scale, while still maintaining a clear line of sight to detailed resource consumption information across various dimensions. This helps to proportionate the cost insights of shared AWS resources, and companies running applications which further helps to establish the data foundation for an accurate cost allocation model.

AWS Billing Conductor

Another great feature offered by AWS Cost Management is the service AWS Billing Conductor. It is a fully managed service with the ability to support the show back and chargeback of the workflows of the AWS Solution Providers and Enterprise end consumers. By implementing the AWS Billing Conductor, the console helps to model a billing relationship between the user and its customers or business units, where customization of their monthly billing data is possible. To accurately show or even charge back the end customers, you can leverage the pro-form of the customization offered for the billing data each month. With the AWS Billing Conductor API or the AWS Billing Conductor itself, you get the ability to operate the configuration of the billing groups and pricing plans.

No change in the way the AWS bills are seen when you start to implement the AWS Billing Conductor, whereas it offers a mechanism for configuring, generating, as well as viewing the rates to specific customers over a given billing period. Analysis can be done for checking the difference between the rates applied to the accounting groupings relative to the actual rates incurred from AWS. The payer of the bill amount gets the full clarity to view the custom rate applied through the billing details page of the AWS Billing console as a result of the AWS Billing Conductor configuration as well as you can simply configure a cost and usage report per billing group also.

Reserved Instance (RI) reporting

To provide a better understanding and manage the Reserved Instance, AWS offers several RI-specific cost management solutions. By implementing the RI Utilization and Coverage reports available in AWS Cost Explorer, the users can visualize their RI data at an aggregate level as well as inspect a particular RI subscription. You can also utilize the AWS Cost and Usage Report for accessing the most detailed RI information available for reporting. Customized RI utilization targets can also be set depending upon the needs of the project using the AWS Budgets, which helps to receive alerts when the utilization drops below the threshold that was specified.

Rightsizing Recommendations

The rightsizing recommendations feature offered by the AWS Cost Explorer, helps the user to identify cost-saving opportunities by downsizing or terminating the EC2 instances in the AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). The rightsizing recommendations analyze the AWS EC2 resources as well as their usage, from where you can check for opportunities about how the spending can be lowered. All the underutilized AWS EC2 instances across member accounts can be seen in a single view for you to immediately identify where you can save more. You can quickly and easily take action for the AWS EC2 console, once your analysis is complete with the recommendations.

The high-level key performance indicators (KPIs) are listed below based on the rightsizing recommendations:

Optimization Opportunities: – Depending upon the resources and usage, how many recommendations are available?

Estimated Monthly Savings: – The sum of the forecasted monthly savings linked with each of the recommendations offered.

Estimate the Savings (in %): – The available savings concerning the direct instance costs (or the On-Demand) linked with the instances as shown in the recommendation list.

Savings Plans

Let us learn about Saving plans in AWS Cost management. Savings Plans provide a flexible pricing model offering savings on AWS usage. Opting for Saving Plans suits your needs, you could save up to 72 per cent on the compute workloads. Once you have signed up for the Savings Plans, the costs you incur stay the same through the plan term as the pay for AWS usage. You can opt for a wide range of savings plans depending on your commitment like All Upfront, Partial Upfront, or No upfront payment options. With the Compute savings plans, you incur lower costs on AWS EC2 instance usage irrespective of which instance size, component, family, OS, tenancy, or AWS Region is selected for that EC2 instance. The same applies to AWS services such as AWS Lambda and AWS Fargate usage. Additionally, the costs incurred by your AWS SageMaker savings plans offer lower prices for the AWS SageMaker instance usage, irrespective of the instance size, component, family, or AWS Region.

With Savings plans you can save beyond the On-Demand rates for a commitment you provide in exchange for the utilization period you specified, like the amount of computing power (measured per hour) for a one or three-year period. These commitments can be managed for the savings plans by analyzing the performance, using recommendations, reporting, and budget alerts in AWS Cost Explorer. You can simply check your AWS Cost Explorer for viewing the recommended Savings Plans commitment, purchase any Savings Plans, refresh, manage and view the historical AWS usage for analysis of which saving plans to buy for optimum cost savings. For providing knowledge of which saving plans to choose from, these recommendations make it easier to validate the commitment level. The recommendations can also be customized to meet the demands and needs, then allowing you to purchase the Savings Plan.

Security

While working with AWS, security in the cloud is the highest priority where an AWS customer reaps all the benefits offered by a data centre and network architecture to offer security in secure-sensitive companies. We know that in AWS the feature of security is a shared responsibility between the AWS and the end user defined by the shared responsibility model. It is divided between the security of the cloud and security in the cloud:

Security of the Cloud: – Here, AWS is responsible to protect the AWS infrastructure of the organization which is running the AWS services in the AWS Cloud. You can securely use any of the AWS services. AWS takes security as a high priority consideration and gets the third-party auditors to regularly test as well as verify the effectiveness of the security to comply by the part of the AWS Compliance Programs.

Security in the Cloud – It is recommended for all AWS users take responsibility for the AWS service that the users want to utilize. The end users are held responsible for all the factors like the organization's requirements, the sensitivity of the data, along with the applicable laws and regulations.

For more information on the Security offered by AWS Billing and Cost Management can be studied in detail from this link: Security in AWS Cost Management

Quotas and restrictions

Listed below is the table that defines the current quotas, and restrictions, along with the naming constraints in the AWS Cost Management features.