AWS Billing and Cost Management: The Secret to Keeping Cloud Costs in Check

aws billing and cost management

Amazon launched a service to help its users do everything concerning their cloud bills. AWS billing and cost management helps users to pay bills, track spending, and analyze their expenditures. Since it helps analyze and control spending, it’s possible to keep cloud costs in check with this service.
Whether you want to estimate cloud costs or receive alerts when your spending exceeds your budget, AWS Billing and Cost Management has all the essential features to help you in cost control. A few of these features include:

  • A free cost explorer that shows all your spending history and forecasts future spending based on past behavior.
  • An AWS budgeting service to help you get simple notifications when your budget goes beyond a given threshold.
  • A billing and cost management console to help users manage automatic credit card payments and billing information.

This blog post discusses major billing and cost management features and explains how you can use each of them to keep cloud costs in check.

AWS Billing and Cost Management: Five Essential Features

1. Use Cost Explorer to Analyze Costs

aws billing and cost management

This tool analyzes your AWS usage, removing the need for a manual review of your finances and expenditure. The portal shows a visual breakdown of all services. It contains several reports. These include monthly costs by linked accounts, monthly running costs report, and EC2 Monthly Cost & Usage reports. People with access to the reports can see expenses over the last 60 days. You can still filter the costs from a monthly basis to a daily basis. You can easily spot the day you spent the most amount of money in a simple bar graph. AWS cost explorer works even for multiple but linked accounts. Use this feature to forecast future budgets and adjust cloud use accordingly.

2. Use AWS Budgeting to Track Usage Costs

aws billing and cost management

3. Use Manage Payments Feature to Estimate Costs

On the billing and cost management console, you’ll find a Payment Methods link. You can view all your registered payment methods. Different payment providers have different transaction fees. Limit these fees. Users can view details of their payment histories. The system calculates bills on the last day of each month. Let’s say there was a month that showed the cheapest costs. You’ll repeat the same activities and practices to help reduce costs in the upcoming months. Auditing past payment transactions is a best practice to help you keep expenditures in check.

4. Study Cost and Usage Reports

Do you want to make data-driven decisions when it comes to your company’s finances? Study cost and usage reports. It’s an AWS feature that analyzes cloud usage. You can view the usage of instances and the number of remaining instances. Try to identify and control cost drivers. By reading the data, you can spot opportunities for optimization.

5. Test AWS Features at No Risk with AWS Free Tier

Free Tier is a first-time user discount that lasts for 12 months. It lets users explore several AWS features for free, at no obligation. However, users shouldn’t exceed their usage limits. You can easily link billing alarms to Free Tier to notify you whenever you exceed allocated resources.
If you want to keep your cloud costs in check, AWS has several products and services to help you do so. AWS has several partners that provide more tools and services to help you with cost control. Third-party tools can make the process easier. 

To learn more on how we can help you keep cloud costs in check, contact us at https://nops.io/.