AWS Billing and Cost Management

AWS Cost Explorer

AWS Cost Explorer is a tool that allows users to view and analyze costs and usage over time. It can identify opportunities for cost optimization in our AWS infrastructure.

Points to note:

• With Cost Explorer, we can analyze expenses for the past 12 months and forecast expenses for the next 12 months.
• Cost Explorer actively assists with EC2 cost optimization by recommending Reserved Instances and savings plans for cost optimization.
• We can only enable AWS Cost Explorer with root account credentials. Even IAM users with the AdministratorAccess policy can’t enable it. Once enabled, Cost Explorer can’t be turned off.
• Apart from the default Cost Explorer reports, we can create custom reports that analyze AWS costs and usage.
• Cost Explorer can analyze the costs of multiple accounts in an AWS Organization.

Cost and Usage Reports

The AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR) provides the most comprehensive and detailed granular (hourly, daily, and monthly) data on usage and costs for AWS resources. It allows customers to understand and break down their costs by services, operations, linked ...