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

• 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 we lose a zone then we 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 we 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
• 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

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