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AWS Billing and Cost Management (Bills)

What it is​

A set of tools and services that help you set up your billing, retrieve and pay invoices, and analyze, organize, plan, and control your AWS costs.

What it's for​

Manage your AWS spending, understand where your money is going, optimize costs, and ensure budget compliance.

Use cases​

  • View current and past invoices (Bills).
  • Analyze costs by service, region, tag, or account.
  • Create budgets and receive alerts when spending exceeds limits.
  • Forecast future spending based on historical usage.
  • Allocate costs to different departments or projects.

Key points​

  • Consolidated billing: For organizations with multiple AWS accounts, enables single payment and consolidated cost view.
  • AWS Cost Explorer: Visual tool to analyze and visualize your AWS costs and usage over time.
  • AWS Budgets: Lets you set custom budgets and receive alerts when costs or usage exceed defined limits.
  • AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR): Provides a comprehensive set of data about your AWS costs and usage, which can be stored in an S3 bucket for detailed analysis.
  • AWS Cost Anomaly Detection: Uses machine learning to identify spending anomalies and alert you to unexpected increases.
  • Bills: The section where you can view and download your detailed AWS invoices.

Comparison​

  • AWS Billing and Cost Management: Offers integrated and automated tools to manage and optimize cloud costs, with granularity and visibility that would be difficult to achieve with traditional methods. Enables a proactive approach to cost control.
  • Traditional financial management: Can be more reactive and less detailed, requiring manual processes to track and allocate infrastructure costs, which can lead to surprises at the end of the month.