In Focus

Cost optimization is one of the pillars for the efficient usage of AWS. However, inspecting and understanding AWS billing reports can be a challenging task.

AWS Pricing by Strake is an open-source project that allows anyone to bring AWS Public pricing into Google Sheets using Strake's custom functions. To help the community get started with this project, Strake published several free templates to help engineers answer critical questions about AWS Pricing. Today, we will use Google Sheets templates to analyze Amazon EC2 Instance and EBS Pricing.

Strake has agreed to assume ownership and maintenance of the AWS Pricing add-on for Google Sheets. The AWS Pricing add-on allows AWS users to query public AWS Pricing data using customer Google Sheets functions. Strake is committed to keeping the project open-source and is excited to continue building on the idea Mike Heffner brought to the AWS community.

Amazon RDS is a managed database service that makes it easy to spin up, operate and scale relational databases to support any size production infrastructure. RDS is one of Amazon Web Services’ most utilized services and has a complicated billing structure encompassing instance running costs, data transfer costs, and provisioned IOPS and Storage.

Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is the backbone of AWS. EC2 allows customers to access hundreds of different instance types across the globe in seconds. This guide walks through the different types of EC2 costs and how to isolate them using SQL analysis on your Cost and Usage Report (CUR). If you don’t have a CUR active in your account, you can check out the first guide which walks through permissions and the process of creating a CUR.

This guide shows you how to share IAM permissions, create a cost and usage report (CUR), and set up a local analysis environment using SQLite3.

The Amazon Cost and Usage Report is the go-to data source for cloud cost management. The Macroscope team did the work of breaking down the most important Cost and Usage Report fields, explained the details they contain, and provided some sample values.

In this overview of AWS Reservations, we will discuss the most popular reservation products: Compute Savings Plans, EC2 Savings Plans, EC2 Reserved Instances, and RDS Reserved Instances. In addition, we will mention the other reservation products offered by AWS and where you can find more information on those products.

Tired of using Cost Explorer for your Amazon Cost Analysis? Look no further. Introducing The Developer's Guide to AWS Costs, an open-source project that gives software engineers the ability to analyze their AWS Costs using SQL and the Cost and Usage Report.

The AWS Enterprise Discount Program (EDP) is a multi-year financial commitment to AWS in return for volume discounts and cost savings. Like most enterprise agreements, an EDP requires complex analysis and requires alignment from the executive team on business goals. This blog outlines the steps any AWS customer should take if they are looking to execute an EDP agreement.

EC2-Other is the catch-all bucket for EC2 costs other than hourly instance costs. If you are a heavy EC2 user, this will be one of the highest cost categories on your AWS bill. It is time to take the EC2-Other category and break it down in a meaningful way to help your engineering teams understand what is driving this massive cost category.

A natural evolution is occurring in the FinOps movement, where the focus and concentration on the development of the practice is moving out of Finance and Business Operations, into Engineering…. Why is this ? The only people who can actually impact cloud spend are engineers. It is for this reason that we are building tools to enable engineers to address the problem as efficiently as possible.