AWS Detailed Billing Reports

At AWS we place a high value on the “Voice of the Customer.” We do our best to listen and to learn, and to make sure that our plans line up with what we are hearing.

We’ve had a number of requests for better access to more detailed billing data. We took the first step earlier this year when we announced Programmatic Access to AWS Billing Data on this blog. That data, along with the AWS Billing Alerts, provided you with additional information about your AWS usage, along with a notification if your spending for the month exceeded a particular amount.

Today we are going a step further, providing you with new AWS Detailed Billing Reports. You now have access to new reports which include hourly line items. If you use a combination of On Demand and Reserved Instances, you will now be able to ensure that you have enough Reserved Instances to meet your capacity requirements for any given hour.

As part of this release, we are also making it easier for you to track and manage the costs associated with Reserved Instances when used in conjunction with AWS Consolidated Billing. This report provides an additional allocation model for linked accounts, with two key features — RI Affinity and Unblended Rates:

• With RI Affinity, the allocated benefit of the less expensive hourly rate for a Reserved Instance is now prioritized to the linked account that purchased the RI first.
• Currently the consolidated bill uses a blended rate (the average of On Demand, Free Usage Tier, and Reserved Instance) when allocating costs to linked accounts. The detailed billing report will continue to include blended rate and cost information, but will now be supplemented with unblended rate and cost as additional columns.

You can sign up for the Hourly reports on your AWS Billing Preferences page:

— Jeff;