Concepts
Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers a comprehensive set of tools to help users monitor and manage their AWS spending and usage.
Three such tools are AWS Budgets, AWS Cost Explorer, and AWS Billing Conductor. Each tool has its specialized uses and capabilities, which can help AWS customers understand and control their cloud costs effectively.
AWS Budgets
AWS Budgets allows customers to set custom budgets to monitor their cost and usage against their budgeted amount. It provides notifications when costs or usage exceed the budgeted amount. This is particularly useful for organizations looking to keep their cloud spending in check.
Capabilities:
- Cost Budgets: You can create budgets to track your costs and receive alerts when you exceed your budgeted amount.
- Usage Budgets: This helps in monitoring the usage of individual services or the overall usage against a threshold.
- Reservation Budgets: Track your Reserved Instances (RI) and Savings Plans utilization and coverage.
Use Cases:
- Cost Control: Organizations can proactively manage their costs by setting a fixed budget for each project or department.
- Resource Management: IT departments can monitor usage patterns and can optimize resource utilization by setting usage budgets.
- Planning and Forecasting: By tracking RI and Savings Plans, finance teams can better plan for future spend.
AWS Cost Explorer
AWS Cost Explorer is a more advanced service that provides an interface for visualizing, understanding, and managing AWS costs and usage over time. It uses easy-to-understand reports and graphics to give insights into spending patterns.
Capabilities:
- Historical Data Analysis: Analyze up to 13 months of historical data to understand spending trends.
- Forecasting: Predict future AWS spending based on historical patterns.
- Cost Allocation Tags: Use tags to organize resources and view a breakdown of costs by tag.
Use Cases:
- Detailed Analysis: When companies need deep analysis like identifying underutilized resources, Cost Explorer is handy.
- Cost Optimization: Helps in identifying potential savings, for instance, by switching to more cost-effective resource types.
- Budget Planning: Finance teams use Cost Explorer for detailed budget planning and resource allocation.
AWS Billing Conductor
AWS Billing Conductor is a tool primarily designed for AWS resellers and enterprises that need to provide transparent, customizable billing to their end-users or departments.
Capabilities:
- Custom Pricing: Set up custom pricing for different products and services offered to end-users.
- Chargebacks and Showbacks: Easily track and allocate costs to the appropriate departments or projects.
- Custom Billing Reports: Generate detailed billing reports tailored to your organization’s needs.
Use Cases:
- Reseller Operations: AWS partners and resellers can customize and mark-up AWS pricing for their customers.
- Internal Chargebacks: Large enterprises can create detailed billing for internal cost allocation.
- Bill Management: Can implement discounts or surcharges on the standard AWS pricing as part of billing offerings.
Comparison
| Feature | AWS Budgets | AWS Cost Explorer | AWS Billing Conductor |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost Monitoring | Yes | Yes | No |
| Cost Forecasting | Yes | Yes | No |
| Custom Budget Alerts | Yes | No | No |
| Historical Analysis | No | Yes | No |
| Custom Pricing | No | No | Yes |
| Chargeback Reports | No | With integration | Yes |
| Usage Budgets | Yes | No | No |
| Custom Billing Reports | No | No | Yes |
Each of these tools serves different purposes in cost management and can be used in concert to provide a comprehensive understanding and control of AWS costs. AWS Budgets is your proactive alarm system for budget control, AWS Cost Explorer is your analytics department digging deep into the data, and AWS Billing Conductor is your accounting firm, tailor-making invoices for various needs.
When preparing for the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam, it’s important to understand the distinctions and use cases for AWS Budgets, AWS Cost Explorer, and AWS Billing Conductor. Knowing when and how to use these services will not only help in passing the exam, but also in managing AWS resources in real-world scenarios.
Answer the Questions in Comment Section
True or False: AWS Budgets can send alerts when your costs or usage exceed your budgeted amount.
- True
- False
Answer: True
Explanation: AWS Budgets allows you to set custom budgets to track your cost and usage, and sends alerts when your costs or usage surpass the thresholds you define.
What can you use AWS Cost Explorer for?
- To set up billing alerts
- To manage IAM users and groups
- To view and analyze your AWS spend over time
- To automate resource provisioning
Answer: To view and analyze your AWS spend over time
Explanation: AWS Cost Explorer is a tool that enables you to visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage over time.
True or False: AWS Billing Conductor is designed to provide a customizable billing experience to end customers.
- True
- False
Answer: True
Explanation: AWS Billing Conductor allows customers to customize and share a curated view of their AWS costs to provide a tailored billing experience for end customers.
Which of the following is not a feature of AWS Budgets?
- Predictive cost forecasting
- Customizing billing data
- Setting cost thresholds for notifications
- Monitoring Reserved Instances (RI) utilization
Answer: Customizing billing data
Explanation: Customizing billing data is a feature of AWS Billing Conductor, not AWS Budgets. AWS Budgets is primarily used for setting budgets, cost forecasting, and monitoring costs and usage.
Using AWS Cost Explorer, you can:
- Apply tags to resources.
- Forecast future AWS spending.
- Buy Reserved Instances directly.
- Deploy new EC2 instances.
Answer: Forecast future AWS spending.
Explanation: AWS Cost Explorer provides cost forecasting features, which allow you to predict future AWS spending based on historical usage patterns.
True or False: AWS Billing Conductor supports creating custom invoices with tailored branding and messaging.
- True
- False
Answer: True
Explanation: AWS Billing Conductor provides the ability to customize invoices with your own branding and personalized messaging for your customers.
Which AWS service assists in analyzing your savings plan and reserved instances’ coverage and utilization?
- AWS Trusted Advisor
- AWS Cost Explorer
- AWS Budgets
- AWS Billing Dashboard
Answer: AWS Cost Explorer
Explanation: AWS Cost Explorer has capabilities that allow you to view how much of your savings plan or reserved instances are being utilized, helping you optimize your cost savings.
True or False: AWS Budgets can only track costs associated with EC2 instances.
- True
- False
Answer: False
Explanation: AWS Budgets can track costs and usage across multiple AWS services, not just EC It is a comprehensive tool for cost tracking and management.
Which AWS service allows you to set custom cost and usage budgets with more than 70 different dimensions?
- AWS Budgets
- AWS Cost Explorer
- AWS Billing Conductor
- AWS Marketplace
Answer: AWS Budgets
Explanation: AWS Budgets offers the flexibility to set custom budgets with a wide range of dimensions including service, linked account, tag, and more.
True or False: AWS Cost Explorer provides recommendations for Reserved Instances (RIs) and Savings Plans purchases.
- True
- False
Answer: True
Explanation: AWS Cost Explorer includes a feature that provides recommendations for Reserved Instances and Savings Plans purchases based on your usage patterns.
AWS Billing Conductor is useful for:
- Implementing governance and compliance measures
- Managing cloud resource provisioning
- Customizing the billing experience for end customers
- Analyzing network performance metrics
Answer: Customizing the billing experience for end customers
Explanation: AWS Billing Conductor allows customers to create a customizable and detailed invoicing experience, suitable for providing personalized bills to end customers.
The AWS Budgets’ “budget actions” feature allows you to:
- Automate EC2 instance scaling
- Automatically stop instances when budget is exceeded
- Create custom billing reports
- Change IAM policies based on budget status
Answer: Automatically stop instances when budget is exceeded
Explanation: Budget actions in AWS Budgets can trigger specific actions when a budget threshold is breached, such as stopping an EC2 instance or sending an SNS notification.
Great blog post! AWS Budgets is a powerful tool for keeping track of your spending. It’s been extremely helpful for my team.
I appreciate the detailed explanation of AWS Cost Explorer. It’s fantastic for diving into cost and usage data analysis.
Can someone explain the main difference between AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Budgets?
Thanks for the clarification!
How does AWS Billing Conductor fit into all of this?
Very informative, thanks!
What do you think are the limitations of AWS Budgets?
Super helpful breakdown of tools!