AWS Billing and Cost Management is a set of tools and services to help ease cloud spend and billing activities. AWS has three main clusters under Billing and Cost Management. These include billing, cost management, and usage reports.

AWS Billing differs slightly from cost management. While billing focuses on automating payments, cost management aims to get you more cloud resources at the least cloud spend.

How Does AWS Billing Work?

The AWS Billing Console collects information from Cost and Usage Reports and presents it for the user to pay.

The AWS Billing Console lets you access all previous payments, access AWS credits, and perform consolidated bills.

What are the Features of the AWS Billing Console

The AWS Billing Console has several handy features. These include:

1. Access to Redeemable Credits: AWS credits can help offset an existing cloud bill. If you’re a new AWS user, you can redeem the free $300 credit. Note that AWS credits only apply to eligible services and cannot be used to offset bills of the previous months before receiving the credit. The AWS Billing Console lists all available AWS credits. You can redeem credits, view the remaining balance, and even download a list of all available credits.

3. View and Pay Your Bill: The Billing Console takes you through a step-by-step method when paying your AWS bill. If you set up automatic payments, AWS will automatically deduct them from your payment system. But if there’s an error, the AWS Billing Console lets you make the payment manually. You can also use the Billing Console to set up bills to appear in your local currency.
4. Managing Your Payment Methods: Use the Billing Console to add a new payment method or remove old payment information. You can also configure your preferred payment methods using this console. By default, AWS presents your latest bill. To view outstanding bills of previous months, use the date filter in the Billing Console.
5. Perform Consolidated Bills: You can also combine bills from multiple accounts into one bill at no extra cost. Consolidated bills are ideal where one business unit pays all AWS costs.

How Does AWS Cost Management Work?

AWS Cost Management is one of the five pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework. By using AWS inbuilt tools, people can use previous data to forecast and optimize future spending.

What are the Features of AWS Cost Management?

Some of the most useful features include the AWS cost explorer, anomaly detection, budgets, and AWS savings plan.

AWS Cost Explorer: If you want to dive deep into how you used your cloud spend, use the AWS cost explorer. This tool has a dashboard showing the cost of each AWS service. The cost explorer also gives reports on the usage of Reserved Instances. The cost explorer shows how costs vary with time. Users can use data from the past year to forecast future spending.

AWS Cost Anomaly Detection: Cost anomaly detection features help your organization find any unusual consumption of cloud resources. Monitoring unusual usage early enough helps prevent skyrocketing costs. AWS uses machine-learning technology to do real-time monitoring of your infrastructure. If the usage patterns deviate from the normal, AWS sends a notification via email or SMS. AI features give the cost explorer deep visibility when detecting the real cause for skyrocketing costs.

AWS Budgets: Use AWS Budgets to define how you use your money in the cloud. This feature helps organizations understand whether they’re running out of funds. For example, you can estimate the costs of running resources and set up a variable monthly budget. You can even set commands that pause resources when you exceed your monthly budget. The AWS Budgeting service can also send alerts whenever you reach a given percentage of your budget.

AWS Savings Plan: AWS users can get significant discounts when they reserve compute capacity with the AWS savings plans. Given the same compute capacity, the total cost of running an EC2 instance on Savings plans could be 70% lower than typical on-demand rates. You can view services eligible for savings plans on the cost management dashboard.

AWS Right-Sizing Recommendations: With a wide array of servers and disks to choose from, it’s possible to overestimate what you need to run your workloads. AWS, however, can help you identify and right size resources with low CPU utilization.

Managing Your AWS Billing With nOps

With so many complexities involved, it can be difficult to oversee your cloud costs as required. The result is spiraling costs, huge spending, and an unprofitable business.

To ease your cost-management efforts, nOps provides clear recommendations on various strategies to keep costs manageable. These reports break down usage by hour, month, and year. You can also filter costs by service to identify where most of your spending is coming from. Besides, the nOps dashboard pulls vital AWS metrics under one pane of glass. It also offers practical action items and simple activities you can implement to achieve compliance.

Get started with a nOps free trial or schedule a demo to see it in action!