Cost management

Controlling an AWS bill comes down to three steps in order: see the spend, attribute it, then reduce it. The pages in this section follow that order.

Seeing it. The cost management tools — Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets and consolidated billing — are where to start. They answer what is being spent and warn before it is spent. Cost and Usage Reports hold the line-item data underneath them, for when the dashboards are not detailed enough.

Attributing it. Spend that cannot be traced to a workload or a team cannot be managed. Tagging and resource groups are what make attribution possible, and they need to be in place before the reduction work begins. In a multi-account organisation, cross-account cost management covers budgeting from the management account and routing alerts back to the account that caused them.

Reducing it. Cost optimisation strategies sets out the levers — rightsizing, purchase options, Region choice, managed services and data transfer — in roughly the order they pay back. The commitment discounts are covered in Savings Plans and instance purchasing options. For the finance vocabulary a business case needs, see cloud cost fundamentals.