AWS Cost Management Tools

AWS provides you with a set of tools for cost management and optimization, free of cost. These tools can save you a suitable amount of money on AWS provided you familiarize yourself with these tools and use them to gain data, make decisions, create rules, and automated actions.

Some tools are, namely:

Billing and Cost Management Console
AWS Cost Explorer
AWS Budgets
AWS Trusted Advisor
Amazon Cloudwatch

Now I will briefly explain the work of each of the above tools and how they can help you with cost management in AWS.

Billing and Cost Management Tool

The billing section of the Amazon Console gives access to all your activities, including what services you are consuming on AWS. It helps you optimize your usage structure so you can manage AWS effectively, also reducing your cost if used properly.

You must use tagging to organize services by project or department. This tool lets you merge AWS accounts and create a single billing entity for each project having a separate budget within your organization.

AWS Cost Explorer

This tool gives you an overview of usage, costs, and returns on investment for AWS. It shows you data for the past 13 months of AWS usage and predicts your future expenditure. This tool also helps you to create customized views to help analyze costs and identify areas for improvement.

It also provides you with an API so you can access the data via your analytics tool.

AWS Budgets

This tool lets you set and enforce budget for specific services and receive notifications in the form of emails or messages from Simple Notification Services (SNS) when the budget reaches or exceeds the set limit.

We can specify an overall cost budget and even set it to specific data points such as several instances per data usage. The dashboard of AWS Budgets provides similar views to those of AWS Cost Explorer, showing how services are being used according to the set budget.

AWS Trusted Advisor

It is a tool that provides guidance based on specific services in AWS, moreover; it is automated. Trusted Advisor checks 5 areas and one of those includes cost optimization. It provides automated optimization recommendations related to:

Underutilized EBS volumes
Unassociated elastic IP addresses
Idle load balancers
Idle Database instances on Amazon RDS
Load utilization of EC2 instances
Redundant route 53 latency resource record sets
EC2 reserved instance optimization and lease expiration
Underutilized Amazon Redshift clusters

Amazon Cloudwatch

It lets you set alarms based on a variety of metrics captured from your AWS usage. It is used for cost optimization and you can set limits as for when you want to be alarmed.