Summary and Quiz

In this lesson, we’ll summarize what we’ve learned so far in this chapter and test our knowledge of the AWS services we learned about with a short quiz.

Summary

Here’s a summary of the key takeaways from this chapter:

AWS Billing and Cost Management

• AWS Billing and Cost Management is an expansive AWS service for managing billing and cost details, encompassing several services that allow us to view bills, explore costs, set budgets, generate financial reports, make saving plans, detect cost anomalies for AWS, and much more.

• By default, IAM users cannot access the Billing and Cost Management dashboard even with the required permissions. Intervention from the root user is required to enable access for IAM users.

AWS Cost Explorer

The AWS Cost Explorer service helps visualize, understand, and manage AWS costs and usage. Here are some key features of the AWS Cost Explorer service:

• Visualization: We can use the Cost Explorer dashboard to visually represent AWS spending.

• Custom reports: We can create custom cost and usage reports tailored to our needs.

• Cost trends: We can gain insights into spending trends over time.

• Identification of cost drivers: We can identify the main factors contributing to AWS costs.

• Anomaly detection: We can spot unusual spending patterns in our AWS accounts.

AWS Budgets

The AWS Budgets service helps us to plan and set up budgets to control AWS costs. We can set up the following types of budgets:

• Cost budget

• Usage budget

• Savings Plans budget (usage-based and coverage-based)

• Reservation budget (usage-based and coverage-based)

Here are some key features of the AWS Budgets service:

• Custom budgets: We can create budgets based on various metrics.

• Alerts: We can set up notifications for when costs exceed the budget via email or SNS.

• Cost and usage tracking: We can track and do a comparative analysis between actual and forecasted costs.

• Budget reports: We can generate detailed reports on our spending patterns.

AWS Savings Plans

The AWS Savings Plans service offers lower costs than On-Demand pricing for consistent AWS usage. It’s best suited for organizations with steady usage of certain AWS services.

Here are some key features of the AWS Savings Plans service:

• Payment options: AWS Savings Plans offers several payment options: “All Upfront,” “Partial Upfront,” and “No Upfront.”

• Savings plan types: AWS Savings Plans offers plans for Compute services in general and more tailored plans for EC2 and SageMaker instances.

• Commitment terms: AWS Savings Plans offers require either a 1-year or 3-year term commitment.

AWS Cost Anomaly Detection

• The AWS Cost Anomaly Detection service detects and alerts us on unusual AWS spending patterns.

• It works by first using machine learning to intially monitor our spending patterns to develop a baseline. Using this baseline, it continuously monitors our costs and alerts us of any cost anomalies.

Here are some key features of the AWS Cost Anomaly Detection service:

• Machine learning analysis: AWS Cost Anomaly Detection continuously uses machine learning to analyze cost patterns and detect anomalies.

• Anomaly alerts: We can enable email or SNS notifications to get alerts of any cost anomalies from AWS Cost Anomaly Detection.

• Root cause analysis: AWS Cost Anomaly Detection is also capable of providing insights into potential causes of the cost anomaly.

Test your knowledge

Take a short quiz to validate that knowledge and to make sure you’ve not missed out on anything: