AWS Billing Reports Are Unpredictable
AWS cloud optimization methodology revolves around PERFORMANCE, AVAILABILITY, and PRICE.
Price is one of the key variables of AWS cloud optimization. You need nearly real-time visibility of overall costs for data and services usage. To get the most of AWS services and its components, it’s essential to keep an eye on the money you’re spending on your project. Losing your grip on your budget means losing your opportunity to deliver fast and reliable applications to your customers and you might end up spending a lot more than expected.
You might find a way to develop the best website, but if you ignore how much you need to pay for it, your project viability is at risk.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) instance cost management is the most common challenge people encounter when they migrate to the cloud. Unfortunately, there is no standardized, effective solution to avoid overspending on instances. Cost management of AWS services requires vigilance and a commitment to continual review.
Calculate your bills
Migrating to AWS can burn a hole in your pocket. To avoid your hefty bills, it’s really important to get an estimate of the overall cost you might need to spend to deploy your project.
For this, you can use the AWS Simple Monthly Calculator to calculate the overall cost of the whole project.
This can be time-consuming and you might need to do manual work to calculate the price of your project. You can avoid all the manual work and monitor AWS usage charges by setting up CloudWatch Billing Alerts. The AWS CloudWatch will alert you about your overspending – if charges exceed a specified threshold. You can also opt for AWS Billing Reports. These reports can be delivered to an S3 bucket of your choice and you can analyze them or make them available for external tools to analyze.
Issues with AWS billing reports
The common issue with AWS billing reports is AWS don’t provide real-time reporting of the costs. The billing metrics are updated once in six hours. Moreover, the AWS cost and usage reports are uncertain. The AWS cost and usage reports update as infrequently as once per day. So if you’re running performance tests or monitoring an infrastructure update, you obviously want to see price metrics as soon as possible or before the usage becomes a pricing issue. Waiting a full day – when the charges have already incurred is a major issue.
Moreover, your billing reports show how much you have already spent but not how much will you spend given on the current configurations. So whenever you are introducing a new service or a new customer on your cloud stack, you are clueless about how much the new configuration will cost you.
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The Solution to Cloud Billing Issues
For real-time cost optimization, you can use AWS Cloud Management tools such as AWS cost calculators – EC2 Cost calculator, S3 Cost Calculator, Lambda Cost Calculator, and Data Transfer Cost Calculator to analyze your exact workload costs, charge-backs, resource utilization, and more. The easy-to-use AWS cost management tool offers simple solutions for deciphering even the most complex invoice as well as services you’re using and how you’re using them. You get a clear, user-friendly invoice report of the servers and services you’re using for the growth of your business or organization.
The best thing about these tools is that calculations are based on nearly real-time. You can choose a system that helps you monitor the recent and past data usage of the cloud services and also calculates exact spending at any given time, depending on real-time dynamics. However, each calculator isn’t created equally so choose the one that meets your business requirements, otherwise, you’ll end up with an additional expensive solution that will make your cloud journey more complex. You also need to ensure to choose the cost management tool that is adaptive to the cloud workload dynamics. This means if you change the workload resource consumption after the last deployment, you should be able to track the new behavior and forecasts will be generated based on the changed behavior.
Want to know more about AWS cost management tools, stay tuned to our blog!