Domain 4 of 4 · Chapter 2 of 3

Billing & Cost Management

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Included in this chapter:

  • The four cost tools and the questions they answer
  • Consolidated billing and cost allocation
  • Marketplace billing and exam-pattern recognition

Which AWS cost tool for which need

ToolPrimary purposeTime orientationNeeds a live AWS account?
AWS Pricing CalculatorEstimate cost of a solution to plan/budgetFuture (before you build)No
AWS Cost ExplorerVisualize and analyze cost/usage trendsPast (up to 13 months) + forecastYes
AWS BudgetsAlert/act when spend crosses a thresholdPresent + forecastedYes
AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR)Deliver most detailed line-item data to S3Past (incurred usage)Yes

Decision tree

Does the workload existand run in AWS yet?No (planning)YesAWS Pricing Calculatorestimate before you buildNeed alerts or actionat a spend threshold?YesNoAWS Budgetsnotify / act on thresholdNeed raw, line-item detaildelivered to S3?YesNoAWS Cost and Usage Reportmost detailed data, query in AthenaAWS Cost Explorervisualize trends, up to 13 monthsMany accounts? Use Organizations consolidated billingone bill, pooled volume discounts (orthogonal to tool choice)
Cheat sheet

Cheat sheet

  • Pricing Calculator estimates cost before you build
  • Cost Explorer analyzes past spend and forecasts
  • AWS Budgets alerts when spend crosses a threshold
  • Budget actions can apply an IAM or SCP policy
  • Cost and Usage Report is the most detailed cost data
  • CUR delivers CSV files to your S3 bucket
  • Match the verb: estimate vs analyze vs alert vs detail
  • Consolidated billing gives one bill for many accounts
  • Consolidated billing pools usage for volume discounts
  • The Free Tier is pooled across the organization
  • Two kinds of cost allocation tags: AWS-generated vs user-defined
  • Cost allocation tags must be activated, not retroactively
  • Tags break costs down by project, team, or cost center
  • AWS Marketplace charges appear on your AWS bill
  • Cost Explorer filters and groups spend by multiple dimensions

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References

  1. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/pricing-calculator/latest/userguide/what-is-pricing-calculator.html
  2. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cost-management/latest/userguide/ce-what-is.html
  3. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cost-management/latest/userguide/budgets-managing-costs.html
  4. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cur/latest/userguide/what-is-cur.html
  5. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2/consolidated-billing.html
  6. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2/cost-alloc-tags.html
  7. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/marketplace/latest/buyerguide/buyer-paying-for-products.html