Moving to the Cloud has changed the way that organizations relate to, and account for, their costs. With the advent of pay-as-you-go pricing, decentralized resource procurement, and a wider breadth of product functionality than ever before, organizations had to change the way they approached their IT-based financial processes. The AWS Cost Management product suite lets you quickly get started accessing, organizing, understanding, controlling, and optimizing your costs and usage. To learn more about the AWS Cost Management suite, see the AWS Cost Management detail page or the AWS Billing and Cost Management User Guide. The following AWS services can be used to help you meet the prescribed benefits of the M&G Guide: The AWS Cost & Usage Reportcontains a comprehensive set of AWS cost and usage data, including additional metadata about AWS services, pricing, Reserved Instances, and Savings Plans. You should use this information to inform and create controls. AWS Cost Exploreris a tool that enables you to view and analyze your costs and usage. You can explore your usage and costs using the main graph, the Cost Explorer cost and usage reports, or the Cost Explorer RI reports. You can view data for up to the last 12 months, forecast how much you’re likely to spend for the next 12 months, and get recommendations for what Reserved Instances to purchase. You can use Cost Explorer to identify areas that need further inquiry and see trends that you can use to understand your costs. AWS uses cost allocation tags to organize your resource costs on your cost allocation report, which makes it easier for you to categorize and track your AWS costs. AWS provides two types of cost allocation tags: AWS-generated tags and user-defined tags. AWS (or AWS Partners) defines, creates, and applies the AWS-generated tags for you, and you define, create, and apply user-defined tags. AWS Cost Anomaly Detection is an AWS cost management feature that uses machine learning to continually monitor your cost and usage to detect unusual spends. AWS Budgetsallows you to set custom budgets to track your cost and usage on a wide variety of use cases. With AWS Budgets, you can choose to be alerted by email or Amazon SNS notification when actual or forecasted cost and usage exceed your budget threshold, or when your actual RI and Savings Plans utilization or coverage drops below your desired threshold. With AWS Budgets actions, you can also configure specific actions to respond to cost and usage statuses in your accounts, so that if your cost or usage exceeds or is forecasted to exceed your threshold, actions can be run automatically or with your approval to reduce unintentional over-spending. AWS Budgets integrates with multiple AWS services, such as AWS Cost Explorer, so that you can easily view and analyze your cost and usage drivers, AWS Chatbot, so you can receive budget alerts in your designated Slack channel or Amazon Chime room, and AWS Service Catalog, so you can track costs on your approved AWS portfolios and products. AWS Cost Categoriesis an AWS cost management feature that enables you to group cost and usage information into meaningful categories based on your needs. You can create custom categories and map your cost and usage information into these categories based on the rules defined by you using various dimensions such as account, tag, service, charge type, and even other cost categories. Tag policies are a type of policy that can help you standardize tags across resources in your organization's accounts. In a tag policy, you specify tagging rules applicable to resources when they are tagged. AWS Resource Groups Tag Editor allows you to add tags to—or edit or delete tags of—multiple AWS resources at once. With Tag Editor, you can search for the resources that you want to tag, and then manage tags for the resources in your search results. AWS License Managerenables management of your software licenses from vendors across AWS and on-premises environments. AWS License Manager lets administrators define and enforce licensing rules that mirror the terms of their licensing agreements and prevent breaches. Portfolio administrators gain control and visibility of all their licenses with the AWS License Manager dashboard integrated with AWS Organizations and reduce the risk of non-compliance, misreporting, and additional costs due to licensing overages. Independent software vendors (ISVs) can also use AWS License Manager to easily distribute and track licenses. AWS Compute Optimizerrecommends optimal AWS resources for your workloads to reduce costs and improve performance by using machine learning to analyze historical utilization metrics Compute Optimizer helps you choose optimal configurations for three types of AWS resources: Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon EBS volumes, and AWS Lambda functions, based on your utilization data. AWS Application Cost Profilerprovides you the ability to track the consumption of shared AWS resources used by software applications and report granular cost breakdown across tenant base. AWS Billing Conductorsimplifies the show-back and charge-back workflows for AWS Solution Providers and Enterprise customers. Using AWS Billing Conductor, you can customize your AWS pricing and monthly billing report according to the billing relationship between you and your end customers. A pro forma billing and cost and usage report is available for viewing and cost allocation purposes. If you would like support implementing this guidance, or assisting you with building the foundational elements prescribed by the M&G Guide, we recommend you review the offerings provided by AWS Professional Servicesor the AWS Partners in the Built on Control Tower program. If you are seeking help to operate your workloads in AWS following this guidance, AWS Managed Services (AMS)can augment your operational capabilities as a short-term accelerator or a long-term solution, letting you focus on transforming your applications and businesses in the cloud. |
