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🧾 09. AWS Billing & Costing Tools
1. Estimate Costs
- We have AWS Pricing Calculator
| Purpose | Estimate monthly or yearly AWS costs before deployment |
|---|---|
| URL | https://calculator.aws |
Steps
- Add AWS services (e.g., EC2, S3, Load Balancer)
- Configure instance type, storage, and pricing model
- Compare On-Demand vs. Savings Plans vs. Reserved Instances
- Create detailed estimates and share reports
🧠 Tip:
Use AWS Pricing Calculator to estimate cost before deployment — not to track real usage.
2. Tracking Costs
- We have Billing Dashboard, Cost Allocation Tags, Cost and Usage Reports, Cost Explorer
🧮 1. Billing Dashboard
| Purpose | Get a high-level view of AWS costs and forecasts |
|---|---|
| Shows | Month-to-date spend, forecast, service-level breakdown |
| Access | AWS Console → Billing & Cost Management |
🏷️ 2. Cost Allocation Tags
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Used to track our AWS cost on a detailed level.
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Purpose: Assign metadata (tags) to group and track costs
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Tags are used to organize resources and create Resource group.
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To edit tags got to Resource group and tag editor
Types
- AWS-generated tags (e.g.,
aws:createdBy) - User-defined tags (e.g.,
user:Department,user:Project)
Use Cases: Cost grouping, resource management, reporting
💡 Tip: Tags can be managed through the Tag Editor and used in Cost and Usage Reports or Budgets.
📊 3. Cost and Usage Report (CUR)
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The AWS Cost & Usage Report contains the most comprehensive set of AWS cost and usage data available, including additional metadata about AWS services, pricing, and reservations (e.g., Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances (RIs))
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The AWS Cost & Usage Report lists AWS usage for each service category used by an account and its IAM users in hourly or daily line items, as well as any tags that you have activated for cost allocation purposes.
| Purpose | Get the most granular cost and usage data |
|---|---|
| Format | CSV / Parquet — delivered to an S3 bucket |
| Includes | Metadata, pricing, reservations, and tags |
| Integrations | Analyze via Athena, Redshift, or QuickSight |
🧠 Exam Tip:
CUR provides hourly or daily-level detail and is the most detailed report for cost analysis.
📈 4. AWS Cost Explorer
Purpose: Visualize, analyze and manage costs over time
Features
- Custom cost/usage reports (daily, monthly, or hourly)
- Filter by service, account, region, or tag
- Forecast spending up to 12 months ahead
- Get Savings Plan recommendations
🧠 Exam Tip:
Use Cost Explorer to forecast 12-month future usage and costs — this is an AWS exam favorite question!
3. Monitor Against Costs Plans
- Billing Alarms & Budgets
⏰ 1. Billing Alarms (CloudWatch)
| Purpose | Notify when actual cost crosses a threshold |
|---|---|
| Location | Only available in us-east-1 |
| Metric | Actual billing metric (not forecast) |
| Notification | Email via Amazon SNS |
🧠 Note: Billing alarms are simple — no filtering or forecasting.
💰 2. AWS Budgets
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Create budget and send alarms when costs exceeds the budget
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For Reserved Instances (RI) • Track utilization • Supports EC2, ElastiCache, RDS, Redshift
| Purpose | Set cost or usage limits with alerts |
|---|---|
| Types of | Cost, Usage, Reservation, Savings Plan |
| Alerts | Up to 5 SNS notifications per budget |
| Filters by | Service, Linked Account, Tag, Region, etc. |
| Frequency | Daily, Monthly, Quarterly, or Annually |
| Example | You can create a $10 monthly budget with email alerts at 80% actual or forecasted usage. |
🧠 Exam Tip:
Budgets support forecast-based alerts, unlike Billing Alarms.
🔍 Summary Table
| Tool | Purpose | Level of Detail | Forecast | Integration |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pricing Calculator | Estimate before using AWS | N/A | ✅ | — |
| Billing Dashboard | High-level monthly view | Basic | ✅ | — |
| Cost Allocation Tags | Organize resources by tag | Medium | — | ✅ |
| Cost & Usage Report | Deep-dive raw data | Very High | — | ✅ |
| Cost Explorer | Graphs & trends | High | ✅ (12 months) | ✅ |
| Billing Alarms | Basic threshold alerts | Low | ❌ | CloudWatch |
| Budgets | Custom alerts & limits | Medium | ✅ | SNS / Cost Explorer |
📘 Quick Exam Recap
- Estimate cost? → Pricing Calculator
- High-level monthly view? → Billing Dashboard
- Tag-based tracking? → Cost Allocation Tags
- Detailed cost data? → Cost & Usage Report (CUR)
- Visualize & forecast costs? → Cost Explorer
- Threshold alert? → Billing Alarm
- Forecast alert? → AWS Budgets