Cost Control

Cost Allocation Tags

aws:CreatedBy

• With Tags we can track resources that relate to each other
• With Cost Allocation Tags we can enable detailed costing reports
• Just like Tags, but they show up as columns in Reports

Trusted Advisor

• Analyze your AWS accounts and provides recommendation:
  • Cost Optimization
  • Performance
  • Security
  • FaultTolerance
  • Service Limits
  • Operational Excellence
• Core Checks and recommendations – all customers
• Can enable weekly email notification from the console

AWS Service Quotas

• Notify you when you’re close to a service quota value threshold
• Create CloudWatch Alarms on the Service Quotas console

Savings Plans

• New pricing model to get a discount based on long-term usage
• Commit to a certain type of usage: ex $10 per hour for 1 to 3 years
• Any usage beyond the savings plan is billed at the on-demand price

AWS Budgets

• Create budget and send alarms when costs exceeds the budget
• 4 types of budgets: Usage, Cost, Reservation, Savings Plans
• For Reserved Instances (RI)
  • Track utilization
  • Supports EC2, ElastiCache, RDS, Redshift
• Up to 5 SNS notifications per budget
• Can filter by: Service, Linked Account,Tag, Purchase Option, Instance Type, Region, Availability Zone, API Operation, etc…
• 2 budgets are free, then $0.02/day/budget

Budget Action

• Run actions on your behalf when a budget exceeds a certain cost or usage threshold
• 3 action types
  • Applying an IAM Policy to a user, group, or IAM role
  • Applying SCP to an OU
  • Stop EC2 or RDS instances
• Actions can be executed automatically or require a workflow to approval process

Cost Explorer

• Visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage over time
• Create custom reports that analyze cost and usage data
• Analyze your data at a high level: total costs and usage across all accounts
• Or Monthly, hourly, resource level granularity
• Choose an optimal Savings Plan (to lower prices on your bill)
• Forecast usage up to 12 months based on previous usage

AWS Compute Optimizer

• reduce costs and improve performance by recommending optimal AWS resources for your workloads
• help to choose optimal configurations and right-size your workload (under/over provisioned)
• use ML to analyze your resources’ configurations and their utilization CloudWatch Metrics
• supported resources
  • EC2 instances
  • EC2 ASG
  • EBS volumes
  • Lambda Functions