Bundled discounts in AWS Cost and Usage Report

Bundled discount is a usage-based discount that has conditional logic associated with usage. Bundled Discount gives customers free or discounted usage in one product/service based on the usage of another product/service. In general, a bundled discount always follows the following pattern: if a customer uses X units of product/service A, this customer gets Y units of product/service B at a discounted price (with a discount Z%).

An example of bundled discounting in practice is AWS Shield Advanced where customers do not have to pay for AWS Web Application Firewall (AWS WAF) separately when enabled. In other words, AWS WAF usage is ‘bundled’ with AWS Shield Advanced. Another example is if a customer creates a NAT gateway along with Network Firewall, standard NAT gateway processing and per-hour usage charges are waived on a one-to-one basis with the processing per GB and usage hours charged for the firewall. This discount will appear on AWS Cost and Usage report under SKU: AmazonEC2-APS2-NatGateway-Hours.

Below we are going to demystify 14 dynamic columns that inform customers about the Bundled Discount value and adjust all the dependent values to amortize this discount properly for cost management and allocation purposes.

New columns and line items

There are 14 new dynamic columns and an associated line item added in Cost and Usage Report (CUR) for bundled discounts. The amount of bundled discounts is provided in the UnblendedCost column, which is shown as the negative cost. “Dynamic” means that if the discount does not apply, these columns will not be present on your CUR. The set of columns and the new line item represent the same information in different ways. Some customers use the columns and some find a separate line item easier to ingest in their systems to represent in their visualization tools.

The 14 new columns include two discount columns (discount/BundledDiscount, discount/TotalDiscount) and the associated Net amount columns. The complete list is mentioned below:

In addition, a new line item is created in Cost and Usage Report. These are the sample values: line_item/line_item_type = Bundled Discount; line_item/line_item_description = Bundled Discount for AmazonEC2; line_item/unbleded_cost = $ value.

Please see the partial sample below (click on the table to enlarge the image):

Sample CUR extract

The first example below shows bundled discount populated as a set of 14 columns and the second as a line item. Both options are present in customer reports in parallel to support the ingestion logic of customers’ choice.

New columns – shown in grey (click on the table to open the image and click again to zoom in):

New line item example (click on the table to open the image and click again to zoom in):

You can find further information on bundled discounts representation in CUR in the Cost and Usage Report User Guide.