Posted On: Jan 23, 2018
Starting today, you can view your amortized reservation costs in AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Cost & Usage Reports, as well as monitor those costs via AWS Budgets. This makes it easier to understand and control the comprehensive costs of workloads covered by your Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon DynamoDB reservations.
When purchasing an Upfront or Partial Upfront reservation, you receive a significant discount by paying in advance of any qualifying resource usage. Because upfront costs are recorded at the time they are charged rather than at the time of associated usage, it can be difficult to understand how to apportion those costs across workloads covered by a reservation in order to determine their amortized cost. Using Cost Explorer, you can now easily track your amortized costs using the advanced options, as all upfront fees are amortized over the duration of the reservation lease and applied to the resource usage covered by that reservation. For example, when tracking a number of projects using a “Project” tag, switching to the amortized cost view and grouping by the “Project” tag will present the comprehensive cost, including the amortized portion of associated upfront fees, of each project over the user-defined time interval. Please note that this information is available programmatically via the AWS Cost Explorer API, and is also accessible via the AWS Cost & Usage Reports.
Additionally, using AWS Budgets, you can monitor your amortized costs by setting budgets that track against your user-defined thresholds.
To learn more about amortized costs, you can refer to the Amortizing Reserved Instances user guide or visit the AWS Cost Management webpages.