Skip to main content

Cost Allocation

Cost Allocation​

Basically just Tagging

AWS Generated Cost Allocation Tags​

  • Automatically applied to resources you create
  • Start with prefix aws:
  • Not applied to resourecs created before activation
  • User Tags:
    • User defined tags
    • Start with prefix user:
  • Cost Allocation Tags only show up in Billing Console

Tag Editor​

  • Allows you to manage tags of multiple resources at once
  • Can add / update / delete tags
  • Search tagged / untagged resources in all AWS Regions

Trusted Advisor​

Trusted Advisor is a service that provides real time guidance to help provision your resources following AWS best practices. It helps you to reduce cost, increase performance, and improve security by optimizing your AWS environment. It's different from AWS Config, which is more about compliance and configuration management

  • No need to install anything
  • Gives high level account assessment
  • Analyzes and provides recommendation for:
    • Cost optimization
    • Service limits
    • Operational excellence
    • Performance
    • Security
    • Fault tolerance
  • Core checks and recs to all customers
  • Can enable weekly emails from UI
  • Full trusted advisors
    • Ability to set CW alarms when reaching limits
    • Programmatic access to AWS Support API
  • Support Plans:
    • Basic
      • 7 core checks
    • Developer
      • Paid for
      • 7 core checks
    • Business
      • Full set of checks
      • Programmatic access
    • Enterprise
      • Same as business, with extra other things
  • Good to Know:
    • Can check if S3 is public, but can't check if S3 objects inside of bucket are public
      • Use EventBridge / S3 Events instead
    • Service limits
      • Limits can only be monitored in Trusted Advisor
      • Cases must be created manually in AWS Support Centre to increase limits
      • OR use AWS Service Quotas service
        • AWS Service Quotas helps us to get notifications around quotas near a certain threshold
        • Helps us to not get throttled
        • Can create CW Alarms over these events when we're about to approach them

EC2 Launch Types & Savings​

  • On Demand Instances: Short workload, predictable pricing, reliable
  • Spot Instances: Good for short cheap workloads, but AWS can reclaim capacity
  • Reserved:
    • Reserved Instances: long workloads
    • Convertible Reserved Instances: Long workloads with flexible instances
  • Dedicated Instances: No other customer will share your hardware
  • Dedicated Hosts: Book an entire physical server, control instance placement, and control many other aspects of host
    • Great for software licenses that oparte at core or socket level
    • Can define Host Affinity so that instance reboots are kept on same host

AWS Savings Plan​

New pricing model to get a discount based on long-term usage

  • Commit to a certain type of usage
    • $10 / hour for 1 to 3 years
    • Anything beyond is based on the on-demand pricing
  • EC2 Instace Savings Plan
    • Up to 72% savings
    • Select instance family, lock to specific region, and lock in OS
  • Compute Savings Plan
    • Up to 66% savings (smaller than EC2, but more flexiility)
    • Ability to move between instance family, region, compute type, OS, and tenancy
  • Sagemaker Savings Plan
    • Up to 64% savings on sagemaker workloads

S3 Storage Classes​

  • All S3 is 11 9's durability
  • S3 Standard General Purpose
    • 99.99% Availability
    • Frequently accessed data
    • Low latency and high throughput
  • S3 Standard Infrequent Access (IA)
    • Charged for extra usage, but static storage is cheaper
    • Less accessed, but requires rapid access
    • 99.9% availability
    • Use for DR and backups
  • S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access
    • Cheaper infrequent access, but if you lose a zone then you can't get them back
    • High durability inside of one AZ
    • 99.5% availability
  • S3 Intelligent Tiering
    • Pay for monitoring, but takes care of movement between storage types
    • Small monthly monitoring fee and auto-tiering fee
    • Moves objects between Access Tiers based on usage
    • Tiers:
      • Frequent access: default
      • IA: not accessed for 30 days
      • Archive IA: not accessed for 90 days
      • Archive Access: not accessed for 90 - 700+ days (configurable)
      • Deep Archive: not accessed for 180 - 700+ days (configurable)
  • Glacier
    • All are based on how fast you can get them vs how expensive they are
      • Low cost object storage
    • Instant retrieval
      • Millisecond retrieval
      • Minimum storage duration of 90 days
    • Flexible retrieval
      • Expedited: 1-5 minutes
      • Standard: 3-5 hours
      • Bulk: 5-12 hours
      • Minimum storage duration of 90 days
    • Deep archive
      • Standard: 12 hours
      • Bulk: 48 hours
      • Minimum storage duration of 180 days
  • S3 Life Cycle Configurations / Rules allow us to transition between tiers
  • Compressing objects saves space
  • S3 requester pays
    • Forces person requesting object to pay, not you
    • You pay for storage cost, but they pay for egress out
    • Need to ensure S3 bucket policy so that user is authenticated via IAM
      • Can't use assume role
      • If it's an assumed role, then it's the owner of the account role that pays
      • So if you create the role, and they assume it, then you'll end up paying

AWS Budgets​

Create budgets and send alarms when cost exceeds the budget

  • 4 types of budgets:
    • Usage
    • Cost
    • Reservation
    • Savings Plan
  • For Reserved Instances
    • Track utilization
    • Supports EC2 elasticache, RDS, and Redshift
  • Up to 5 SNS notifications per budget
  • Can filter by many tag and metadata values
  • Same options as AWS Cost Explorer
    • Cost explorer tracks usage and reports over a 14 month period
    • Cost reports can send notifiactions based on usage and cost
      • There are up to 50 tags per EC2 instance, and these can be used to filter down reports to track usage
  • Runs actions for you when budget exceeds a certain threshold
    • Budget service itself will run some compute
    • Supports 3 action types:
      • Apply IAM policy to a user, group, or IAM role
      • Apply an SCP to an OU
      • Stop EC2 or RDS instances

Savings Plans and Reserved Instances can be tracked here too - they are different in scope, but similar:

  • Reserved Instances are for specific instance types within a region, whereas Savings Plans are more flexible and can apply to various instance types and regions based on your usage commitment
  • Savings plans mean you're committing to a certain amount of usage ($/hour) for a 1 or 3 year period, whereas Reserved Instances are committing to specific instance types and configurations for a 1 or 3 year period

AWS Compute Optimizer​

  • Can help us with right sizing EC2 instances based on metrics around CPU, RAM, Network, Disk, etc...
  • Setup CW Agent on EC2 instances and send metrics to AWS Compute Optimizer