Cloud Financial Management with AWS
The cloud allows you to trade capital expenses (such as data centers and physical servers) for variable expenses, and only pay for IT as you consume it. And, because of the economies of scale, the variable expenses are much lower than what you would pay to do it yourself. Whether you were born in the cloud, or you are just starting your migration journey to the cloud, AWS has a set of solutions to help you manage and optimize your spend.
During this unprecedented time, many businesses and organizations are facing disruption to their operations, budgets, and revenue. AWS has a set of solutions to help you with cost management and optimization. This includes services, tools, and resources to organize and track cost and usage data, enhance control through consolidated billing and access permission, enable better planning through budgeting and forecasts, and further lower cost with resources and pricing optimizations. To learn how you can optimize and save costs today, visit our cost optimization page.
AWS Cost Management Solutions
You need complete, near real-time visibility of your cost and usage information to make informed decisions. AWS equips you with tools to organize your resources based on your needs, visualize and analyze cost and usage data in a single pane of glass, and accurately chargeback to appropriate entities (e.g. department, project, product). Rather than centrally policing the cost, you can provide real-time cost data that makes sense to your engineering, application, and business teams. The detailed, allocable cost data allows teams to have the visibility and details to be accountable of their own spend.
Business and organization leaders need a simple and easy way to access AWS billing information, including a spend summary, a breakdown of all service costs incurred by accounts across the organization, along with discounts and credits. Customer can choose to consolidate your bills and take advantage of higher volume discounts based on aggregated usage across your bills. Leaders also need to set appropriate guardrails in place so you can maintain control over cost, governance, and security. AWS helps organizations balance freedom and control by enabling the governance of granular user permission.
Businesses and organizations need to plan and set expectations around cloud costs for your projects, applications, and more. The emergence of the cloud allowed teams to acquire and deprecate resources on an ongoing basis, without relying on teams to approve, procure and install infrastructure. However, this flexibility requires organizations to adapt to the new, dynamic forecasting and budgeting process. AWS provides forecasts based on your cost and usage history and allows you to set budget threshold and alerts, so you can stay informed whenever cost and usage is forecasted to, or exceeds the threshold limit. You can also set reservation utilization and/or coverage targets for your Reserved Instances and Savings Plans and monitor how they are progressing towards your target.
With AWS, customers can take control of your cost and continuously optimize your spend. There are a variety of AWS pricing models and resources you can choose from to meet requirements for both performance and cost efficiency, and adjust as needed. When evaluating AWS services for your architectural and business needs, you will have the flexibility to choose from a variety of elements, such as operating systems, instance types, availability zones, and purchase options. AWS offers resources optimization recommendations to simplify the evaluation process so you can efficiently select the cost-optimized resources. We also provide recommendations around pricing models (up to 72% with Reserved Instances and Savings Plans and up to 90% with Spot Instances) based on your utilization patterns, so you can further drive down your cost without compromising workload performance.
AWS Cost Management Services
Whether you want to organize and track your cost and usage, enhance control through consolidated billing and access permission, enable better planning through budgeting and forecasting, or further lower cost with resources and pricing optimizations, you can leverage our services, tools, and resources to help reduce your AWS bill.
Use Cases | Capabilities | AWS Resources |
---|---|---|
Organize | Construct your cost allocation and governance foundation with your own tagging strategy | AWS Cost Allocation Tags | AWS Cost Categories |
Report | Raise awareness and accountability of your cloud spend with the detailed, allocable cost data | AWS Cost Explorer | AWS Cost and Usage Report |
Access | Track billing information across the organization in a consolidated view | AWS Consolidated Billing | AWS Purchase Order Management | AWS Credits |
Control | Establish effective governance mechanisms with the right guardrails in place | AWS Cost Anomaly Detection | AWS Identity and Access Management | AWS Organizations | AWS Control Tower | AWS Service Catalog |
Forecast | Estimate your resource utilization and spend with forecast dashboards that you create | AWS Cost Explorer (Self-Service) | AWS Budgets (Event-Driven) |
Budget | Keep your spend in check with custom budget threshold and auto alert notification | AWS Budgets | AWS Budget Actions | AWS Service Catalog |
Purchase | Leverage free trials and programmatic discounts based on your workload pattern and needs | AWS Free Tier | AWS Reserved Instances | AWS Savings Plans | AWS Spot Instances | Amazon DynamoDB On-demand |
Elasticity | Scale and schedule your services based on your expected utilization pattern and needs | AWS Instance Scheduler | Amazon Redshift pause and resume | EC2 Auto Scaling | AWS Trusted Advisor |
Rightsize | Align your service allocation size to your actual workload demand | AWS Cost Explorer Right Sizing Recommendations | AWS Compute Optimizer | Amazon Redshift resize | Amazon S3 Intelligent Tiering |
Inspect | Stay up-to-date with your resource deployment and cost optimization opportunities |
Featured Resources
Explore the following highlighted resources to get started with optimizing your AWS cost and capacity. You can also find more prescriptive guidance on our cost optimization page.
Presentations
Savings Plans is a flexible pricing model that provides savings of up to 72% on your AWS compute usage. Attend this tech talk to learn how to get started with Savings Plans using AWS Cost Explorer.
AWS offers a broad set of services that will help you optimize your spend depending on your workload and usage patterns. Watch this tech talk to learn nine practical steps to reduce your AWS costs.
It’s easier than ever to grow your compute capacity and enable new types of cloud computing applications while maintaining the lowest TCO by blending Amazon EC2 Spot, On-Demand, and Reserved Instance purchase models.
Blogs
This blog channel highlights service and feature announcements, best practices, and real-world customer examples, around how-to report, control, plan, and optimize your AWS costs and usage.
AWS’s breadth of services and pricing options offer the flexibility to effectively manage your costs, and still keep the performance and capacity per your business requirement.
Learn how to leverage the visibility and continuous optimization of your cloud spend, and integrate these in your business decisions.
Special Federal Programs
An SBA loan that helps businesses keep their workforce employed during the Coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis.
This loan advance will provide up to $10,000 of economic relief to businesses that are currently experiencing temporary difficulties.
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Enable, provision, and operate your environment for both business agility and governance control.