It can be a challenge to manage AWS costs, and native tools might not effectively address it. Learn how third-party vendors can help.
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Published: 30 Jul 2018 AWS has become the largest, most dominant public cloud provider in the world, thanks to relentless innovation of new services; secure, globally available infrastructure; and the flexibility to deploy resources and managed services at a moment's notice. Unfortunately, these services are not always cheap. Although AWS' consumption-based billing model has the potential to be efficient, it can also lead to tremendous waste. Except for a few new services, like Lambda, AWS doesn't charge for operational usage, but it does charge for resource consumption. The bill for an individual EC2 instance is the same whether it runs at 95% utilization or 5%. Over time, as cloud usage progresses from niche to broad deployments, most enterprises discover -- usually after receiving their first six-figure monthly bill -- the critical importance of AWS cost management. How costs can spiral out of controlAnyone who remembers the early days of cellular plans, which charged for every text message or minute of usage, knows that a usage-based pricing model isn't always efficient or cheaper than an unlimited plan. AWS' usage model is similar, as resources are so simple to provision -- yet it's easy to forget to scale them back when you no longer need them.
Thus, the two biggest sources of AWS cost overruns are related:
Additionally, other factors exacerbate the wastage. Overprovisioned resources can often start out too large and quickly become too expensive for the job at hand. Also, little or no governance over multiple accounts can lead to resource redundancy and no accountability over usage. It's also important to understand the relatively complex pricing and discount models for AWS virtual infrastructure. For example, EC2 has four different pricing plans:
Not only do the byzantine, non-uniform pricing models of AWS and its competitors make comparison shopping nearly impossible, they also require customers to match individual workload characteristics with the appropriate pricing plan. For example, Dropbox, a company built on AWS and an enormous user of cloud resources, saved a net of almost $75 million over two years when it moved storage off of Amazon S3 and onto internal, custom-designed infrastructure. While most enterprises don't have million-dollar monthly AWS bills, nor Dropbox's need for capacity, this example shows how blind usage of AWS can result in massive overspending. AWS-native toolsIn addition to detailed cost and usage reports, which provide granular, log file-level detail, AWS offers six tools to assist customers in cost assessment and management:
The case for third-party vendorsOrganizations should start with AWS-native tools before they spend money elsewhere for AWS cost management. Even if AWS tools prove inadequate for their cost assessment needs, organizations can learn which features they will need from a third-party product. Third-party products can fill gaps in AWS-native tools for organizations that deploy advanced cloud environments, such as a multi-cloud architecture. AWS has historically taken a dim view of the concept of hybrid or multi-cloud -- until recently. As multi-cloud deployments grow in popularity, enterprises need cost management tools that can work across platforms, unlike native AWS tools. Additionally, AWS tools provide a basic set of reports, charts and forecasting algorithms, but there's room for improvement. For example, even an automatic tool like Trusted Advisor can't analyze an entire fleet of EC2 instances, storage volumes and workloads to suggest optimal sizing and workload placement strategies. AWS could stand to improve its forecasting methods, which use simple linear extrapolations of past trends, not powerful machine learning algorithms, which can automatically establish normal usage baselines, detect temporal versus long-term trends and make more accurate usage forecasts. Also, AWS visualizations and dashboards have limited customization options, particularly for services other than EC2. Through its cost management APIs, AWS has provided the hooks for third-party software and services to access cost, usage and pricing data. These third-party AWS cost management tools generally simplify the configuration process, but it gets more complicated when you want to use them to pull data from multiple environments. In this situation, the level of integration might not be as tight, and on-premises systems might even require additional software or plug-ins. Third-party products might also lack support for the latest Amazon cloud services, such as Lambda, Aurora or AI products. Add-on products also include additional expenses, not just for licensing, but also training and administrative overhead. Editor's noteWith extensive research into cloud cost management vendors, TechTarget editors have focused this series of articles on vendors that specialize in the AWS environment. Our research included Gartner and TechTarget surveys. Which AWS tool gives users the ability to plan their service usage service cost?The AWS Cost Management product suite gives you the ability to access, organize, understand, control, and optimize your cloud-based costs and usage.
Which AWS services can be used to forecast your AWS account usage and costs?AWS Cost Explorer enables you to view and analyze your AWS Cost and Usage Reports (AWS CUR). You can also predict your overall cost associated with AWS services in the future by creating a forecast of AWS Cost Explorer, but you can't view historical data beyond 12 months.
Which AWS service enables you to set custom cost and usage budgets to manage your AWS spend more easily?AWS Budgets lets you set custom cost and usage budgets that alert you when your budget thresholds are exceeded (or forecasted to exceed). You can also create budgets to track your aggregate Reservation and Savings Plans utilization and coverage metrics.
Which AWS service or feature enables users to get one bill and easily track charges?You can use the consolidated billing feature in AWS Organizations to consolidate billing and payment for multiple AWS accounts or multiple Amazon Web Services India Private Limited (AWS India) accounts. Every organization in AWS Organizations has a management account that pays the charges of all the member accounts.
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