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Cost Optimization / Explorer / Billing

Cost Optimization with AWS

Cloud Financial Management with AWS

Billing access - How to allow an IAM user to access Billing Dashboard in AWS? | by Rohit Vyas | Medium

  • On account settings page, scroll down and you will get “IAM User and Role Access to Billing Information” with “edit” link button.
  • Mark this “Activate IAM Access” checkbox

Region Costs​

  • Oregon - 333.98
  • N.Virginia - 333.98
  • Singapore - 440.74
  • Hyderabad - 433.53

AWS Cost Explorer​

Different Costs Type​

Unblended costs​

The vast majority of AWS customers use the unblended cost dataset to understand their usage. This is the cost dataset presented to you on the Bills page. It’s the default option for analyzing costs using AWS Cost Explorer or setting custom budgets using AWS Budgets.

Unblended costs represent your usage costs on the day they are charged to you. In finance terms, they represent your costs on a cash basis of accounting. For most of you, this is the only cost dataset that you will ever need.

Amortized costs​

Viewing your amortized costs is useful in cases in which it doesn’t make sense to view your costs on the day that they were charged. Or, as many of finance owners say, it’s useful to view costs on an accrual basis rather than a cash basis. This cost dataset is especially useful for those of you who have purchased AWS Reservations such as Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances.

Savings Plans and Reservations often have upfront or recurring monthly fees associated with them. As you can see in the first chart, these recurring fees are charged on the first day of the month. That can lead to a spike on one day, if you are using unblended costs as your cost dataset. When you toggle over to amortized costs, these recurring costs (as well as any upfront costs) are distributed evenly across the month.

Blended costs​

Blended costs were originally created to support customers who chose to consolidate their billing under a single paying account. Nowadays, these costs are not used frequently due to the way that they are calculated.

Blended costs are calculated by multiplying each account’s service usage against something called a blended rate. A blended rate is the average rate of on-demand usage, as well as Savings Plans- and reservation-related usage, that is consumed by member accounts in an organization for a particular service.

Understanding your AWS Cost Datasets: A Cheat Sheet | AWS Cloud Financial Management

AWS Cost Explorer now supports Hourly and Resource Level Granularity

Resource-level data at daily granularity - AWS Cost Management

  • In Cost Explorer, you can enable resource-level data for your chosen AWS services at daily granularity for the past 14 days.
  • We will disable resource-level data at daily granularity for your organization if no one in the organization accesses it in three consecutive months. However, if you need the data, you can re-enable it in Cost Management preferences.

Cost Anomaly Detection​

AWS Cost Anomaly Detection

AWS Cost Optimization Hub​

Consolidate and Prioritize Cost Optimization Opportunities

Cost Optimization Hub allows you to easily identify, filter, and consolidate over 15 types of AWS cost optimization recommendations, such as EC2 instance rightsizing recommendations, Graviton migration recommendations, idle resource detection, and Savings Plans recommendations across your AWS accounts and AWS Regions within your organization through a single dashboard, so that you can get the most out of your AWS spend. Cost Optimization Hub helps you quantify and aggregate estimated savings of these recommendations, taking your specific discount with AWS, such as Reserved Instances and Savings Plans, into consideration, so you can easily compare and prioritize recommendations. With Cost Optimization Hub, you can get answers to your cost optimization questions within minutes, such as "How much can I save by implementing rightsizing recommendations?" "Which AWS accounts have the most cost optimization opportunities?" and "What are the top 3 actions I can take to save costs?" and drive cost optimization initiatives through a single pane of glass.

Cost Optimization Hub

Introducing Cost Optimization Hub

Rightsizing Recommendations​

Optimizing your cost with Rightsizing Recommendations - AWS Cost Management

AWS Compute Optimizer​

NOTE:

  1. We can use this AWS service for Databases running on EC2 for rightsizing recommendation
  2. It did not provide recommendations specifically for Amazon RDS

AWS Compute Optimizer recommends optimal AWS Compute resources for your workloads to reduce costs and improve performance by using machine learning to analyze historical utilization metrics. Over-provisioning compute can lead to unnecessary infrastructure cost and under-provisioning compute can lead to poor application performance. Compute Optimizer helps you choose the optimal Amazon EC2 instance types, including those that are part of an Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling group, based on your utilization data. It does not recommend instance purchase options.

Supported resources and requirements​

Compute Optimizer generates recommendations for the following resources:

  • Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances
  • Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling groups
  • Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes
  • AWS Lambda functions
  • Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) services on AWS Fargate
  • Commercial software licenses

AWS Trusted Advisor​

  • We can use AWS Trusted Advisor service that provides best practice recommendations across various categories, including cost optimization.
  • While it may not directly recommend RDS resizing, it offers insights into cost-effective resource utilization and can highlight opportunities for optimization.
  • AWS Trusted Advisor is a service that analyzes your AWS environment and provides real-time, actionable recommendations to help you optimize your cloud infrastructure by improving cost savings, performance, security, operational excellence, and service limits. It scans your infrastructure to ensure it adheres to AWS best practices, offering suggestions to resolve issues and improve your overall cloud posture. Trusted Advisor Priority is an advanced version available to AWS Enterprise Support customers, offering context-driven, prioritized recommendations from their AWS account team.
  • Recommendations
    • Cost Optimization
    • Performance
    • Security
    • Fault Tolerant
    • Service Limits

Organizational view for AWS Trusted Advisor - AWS Support

  1. How do I start using Trusted Advisor? - YouTube
  2. Minimum spend of $29.00 or 3% of monthly AWS charges, whichever is higher

Use AWS Trusted Advisor checks on Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances to automatically renew reserved instances (RI). - AWS Trusted advisor also suggests Amazon RDS idle database instances - AWS Trusted Advisor checks for Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances that are scheduled to expire within the next 30 days or have expired in the preceding 30 days. Reserved Instances do not renew automatically; you can continue using an Amazon EC2 instance covered by the reservation without interruption, but you will be charged On-Demand rates. AWS Trusted advisor does not have a feature to auto-renew Reserved Instances.

CUDOS Dashboard / CID (Cloud Intelligence Dashboard)​

Savings Plan​

  • Savings plan is not application for spot instances
  • Commit to a minimum amount of spending per hour for one or three years to receive a discount on On-Demand Instances. Savings Plans can offer up to 72% off the regular price. However, they can't be canceled during the term and can waste money if not fully utilized.

Spot Instances​

Provide access to leftover capacity at a discount of up to 90% off the On-Demand price. However, they aren't guaranteed to be available and are not ideal for mission-critical workloads because AWS can reclaim them with just two minutes notice.

savings and spot usage

EC2 Spot Instances vs. AWS Savings Plans: What are the Potential Savings?

Spot vs. Savings Plans: How to Get Discounts Across All Of Your AWS Spend | nOps

Effective utilization of AWS Savings Plans and EC2 spot instances | Spot.io

Spot Instances - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

Best practices for EC2 Spot - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

Spot don't use savings plan​

Spot instances do not use AWS Savings Plans

  • Price: Spot instances are already up to 90% discounted, so other discounts like Savings Plans won't apply.
  • Commitment: Savings Plans require a commitment and can't be canceled during the term.
  • Usage: Savings Plans don't apply to spot usage or usage covered by Reserved Instances (RIs).

Spot instances can be a good option for applications that are fault-tolerant, stateless, or flexible, such as web servers, big data, and containerized workloads. However, because AWS can reclaim Spot instances with just a two minute warning, they might not be ideal for mission-critical or production workloads.

Spot Requests​

A Spot Instance request is either one-time or persistent. If the spot request is persistent, the request is opened again after your Spot Instance is interrupted. If the request is persistent and you stop your Spot Instance, the request only opens after you start your Spot Instance.

If your Spot Instance request is active and has an associated running Spot Instance, or your Spot Instance request is disabled and has an associated stopped Spot Instance, canceling the request does not terminate the instance; you must terminate the running Spot Instance manually. Moreover, to cancel a persistent Spot request and terminate its Spot Instances, you must cancel the Spot request first and then terminate the Spot Instances.

Spot Fleet​

A Spot Fleet is a set of Spot Instances and optionally On-Demand Instances that is launched based on criteria that you specify. The Spot Fleet selects the Spot capacity pools that meet your needs and launches Spot Instances to meet the target capacity for the fleet. By default, Spot Fleets are set to maintain target capacity by launching replacement instances after Spot Instances in the fleet are terminated. You can submit a Spot Fleet as a one-time request, which does not persist after the instances have been terminated. You can include On-Demand Instance requests in a Spot Fleet request.

Savings plan Utilization Report and Coverage Report​

Utilization Report: Measures the amount of the savings plan you are using. If it's less than 100% it means that you reserved more than you need.

Coverage Report: Measures the percentage of your costs covered by the savings plan. If it's less than 100%, you can increase your savings plan to optimize costs.

Ideally, both should be 100%, but I would say that it's more important to keep the utilization report at 100% because it's already a fixed cost that you already acquired. The coverage report indicates further improvement opportunities to reduce costs.

Compute Savings Plan​

The Compute Savings Plan is the most flexible type of Savings Plan offered by AWS, and it applies to a broad range of compute services—including Amazon EC2, AWS Fargate, and AWS Lambda. Unlike EC2 Instance Savings Plans, Compute Savings Plans are not tied to a specific instance family or Region, making them ideal for organizations with varied or evolving compute needs. In this scenario, since the company is using EC2, Fargate, and Lambda in a steady state, a Compute Savings Plan provides a unified way to reduce costs across all three services with minimal administrative effort. It allows the company to maintain its existing architecture without modification while achieving long-term cost savings.

SageMaker Savings Plan​

Amazon SageMaker is not included under Compute Savings Plans, so workloads running on SageMaker require a SageMaker-specific Savings Plan for cost optimization. The SageMaker Savings Plan provides flexible discounts for various SageMaker components including training jobs, real-time inference, batch transform, and SageMaker Studio notebooks. By committing to a one- or three-year usage plan, companies can achieve significant cost reductions—up to 64%—compared to On-Demand pricing. In this use case, since SageMaker is used for inference workloads that are stable and predictable, a dedicated SageMaker Savings Plan is the most efficient and operationally simple approach to reduce costs.

Reserved Instances​

With Aurora MySQL they have size flexibility -- so they can purchase a T3.Large, and run 4 T3.Smalls to get the discount (or whatever the size factor is). However, they must commit to the T3 family. They will not be able to get the discount by running a T2 RDS instance. That T2 will be billed on-demand rates.

Also RDS RI purchased in one account can be used in another account if RI sharing is enabled (consolidated billing).

If running a instance for less than 12-15 hours then on-demand can be cheaper than RI, since RI's cost is 24 hours, and doesn't depend on if the instance is used or not.

Reservations Utilization Report and Coverage Report​

Reserved Instance Reporting

Other Tools​

Tools for checking costs​

Alerting​

Wrong Costs​

AWS Wrong Costs

AWS Wrong Data Transfer Costs

AWS Support​

AWS Support Plans - AWS Support

  • Basic - free and included for all AWS customers
  • Developer
  • Business
  • Enterprise On-Ramp
  • Enterprise