In the current rapidly evolving digital landscape, cloud computing becomes increasingly prevalent, and due to this managing and optimizing costs on cloud services is becoming more critical. AWS, which is one of the most popular cloud service providers, provides a powerful tool called Cost Explorer. This tool can help you to minimize your AWS budget. In this blog, we will discuss what AWS Cost Explorer is, how it works, and how we can use it effectively to control our cloud costs. Let’s see how it helps in minimizing your AWS budget with Cost Explorer.
What is AWS Cost Explorer?
It is a cost management tool that enables you to analyse and visualize your AWS usage and costs. It provides an easy-to-use interface by using which we can understand how we are spending money on AWS services and how we need to spend. Also it provides usage and costs reports which help us to understand our spending and gives opportunities to reduce our AWS bill.
With AWS Cost Explorer, we can:
- We can monitor our cloud cost and usage data over different time periods.
- Easily explore our AWS costs and usage data visually through various reports, charts, and graphs.
- Helps to view costs according to services, regions, tags, and many more dimensions.
- It provides reports and you can also create custom reports and use them for future use.
- Set cost and usage alerts for getting notifications when you exceed a specific budget or usage limit.
How AWS Cost Explorer work?
AWS Cost Explorer works by collecting usage data from your AWS account, doing cost processing, and finally presenting it in an intuitive and easy-to-use interface. These data are collected and processed by AWS Cost Management. AWS Cost Management is a suite of tools which includes AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Cost, AWS Budgets, and Usage Reports.
In the initial use of AWS Cost Explorer, it will automatically retrieve data for the last twelve months. We can view our AWS services cost and usage data through the console it provides called AWS Management Console. If needed we can also export it to Amazon S3 for further analysis, visualization, and customization.
Minimizing your AWS budget with Cost Explorer:
1. Set Budget and Usage Report
The initial step for minimizing your AWS budget with AWS Cost Explorer is to set cost and usage alerts. So, this feature allows you to define specific budget or usage limits according to your convenience. When you exceed your limits, you will receive a notification via email or SNS (Simple Notification Service) and you can also view them in AWS Management Console. You can set cost and usage alerts for certain tags, regions, or services. It also allows you to actively monitor your spending cost and help you to prevent unexpected costs. After getting alerts and notifications, you can take prompt action to limit your usage of AWS services and stay on top of your AWS expenses.
2. Exploring your data regularly
It’s really very important to analyse or explore your usage data and service costs on a regular basis. By which you can find the areas where you can save your spending. By following this practice, it will help you to find cost trends and patterns of your usage, for optimizing your AWS budget. AWS Cost Explorer makes your visualization easiest by providing data through various types of graphs, charts, and reports. According to your need, you can also create your custom reports. You can view your last twelve months of data through this, and you can also forecast your spending for the next twelve months.
3. Reserved Instances
Reserved Instances (RIs) are a pricing model which offer discount on EC2 instances if you make a commitment to use these virtual machines for a specified period. By using reserved instances and discounts you can reduce your EC2 expenses. AWS Cost Explorer recommend you to which reserved instances you should purchase based on the earlier usage data, which helps you in taking decision. It will also help you to monitor your RI usage and will provide you opportunities to save money.
4. Use Saving Plans
AWS offer another pricing model known as savings plans, by using which you can save up to 72% on your AWS usage. It will help you to optimize your AWS budget. Analyse your sage and cost data through AWS Cost Explorer and use this information to determine the appropriate savings plan for you. You can also monitor your purchased savings plan usage through the console.
We can take benefits of these three saving plans:
- Compute Savings Plans
- EC2 Instance Savings Plans
- SageMaker Savings Plans
5. Cost Allocation Tags
For getting a complete view of your AWS spending, you can use cost allocation tags and apply tags on your AWS resources. It will make easy tracking and analysing AWS usage. Tags are same as labels that you need to attach on AWS resources you are using. This will make your process of finding easy. There are some AWS generated cost allocation tags, as well you can also define your own tags i.e., user defined cost allocation tags. It also provides the cost allocation report based on all the tagged and untagged AWS resources.
Conclusion:
In conclusion, with the growing demand for AWS services, it seems to very challenging to reduce your AWS cost. But by using above mentioned tips we can easily minimize your AWS budget with AWS Cost Explorer. So, by using AWS Cost Explorer, we can control our AWS expenses and make decisions about how to optimize our usage and cost of AWS services.
For more details get in touch with Naincy Kumari at Naincy.Kumari@NashTechglobal.com.
