Amazon Web Services

The cloud allows you to trade capital expenses (such as data centers and physical servers) for variable expenses, and only pay for IT as you consume it. And, because of the economies of scale, the variable expenses are much lower than what you would pay to do it yourself. Whether you were born in the cloud, or you are just starting your migration journey to the cloud, AWS has a set of solutions to help you manage and optimize your spend.

During this unprecedented time, many businesses and organizations are facing disruption to their operations, budgets, and revenue. AWS has a set of solutions to help you with cost management and optimization. This includes services, tools, and resources to organize and track cost and usage data, enhance control through consolidated billing and access permission, enable better planning through budgeting and forecasts, and further lower cost with resources and pricing optimizations.

Organize and Report Cost and Usage based on User-Defined Methods

You need complete, near real-time visibility of your cost and usage information to make informed decisions. AWS equips you with tools to organize your resources based on your needs, visualize and analyze cost and usage data in a single pane of glass, and accurately chargeback to appropriate entities (e.g. department, project, product). Rather than centrally policing the cost, you can provide real-time cost data that makes sense to your engineering, application, and business teams. The detailed, allocable cost data allows teams to have the visibility and details to be accountable of their own spend.

Billing with Built-in Control

Business and organization leaders need a simple and easy way to access AWS billing information, including a spend summary, a breakdown of all service costs incurred by accounts across the organization, along with discounts and credits. Customer can choose to consolidate your bills and take advantage of higher volume discounts based on aggregated usage across your bills. Leaders also need to set appropriate guardrails in place so you can maintain control over cost, governance, and security. AWS helps organizations balance freedom and control by enabling the governance of granular user permission.

Improved Planning with Flexible Forecasting and Budgeting

Businesses and organizations need to plan and set expectations around cloud costs for your projects, applications, and more. The emergence of the cloud allowed teams to acquire and deprecate resources on an ongoing basis, without relying on teams to approve, procure and install infrastructure. However, this flexibility requires organizations to adapt to the new, dynamic forecasting and budgeting process. AWS provides forecasts based on your cost and usage history and allows you to set budget threshold and alerts, so you can stay informed whenever cost and usage is forecasted to, or exceeds the threshold limit. You can also set reservation utilization and/or coverage targets for your Reserved Instances and Savings Plans and monitor how they are progressing towards your target.

Optimize Costs with Resource and Pricing Recommendations

With AWS, customers can take control of your cost and continuously optimize your spend. There are a variety of AWS pricing models and resources you can choose from to meet requirements for both performance and cost efficiency, and adjust as needed. When evaluating AWS services for your architectural and business needs, you will have the flexibility to choose from a variety of elements, such as operating systems, instance types, availability zones, and purchase options. AWS offers resources optimization recommendations to simplify the evaluation process so you can efficiently select the cost-optimized resources. We also provide recommendations around pricing models (up to 72% with Reserved Instances and Savings Plans and up to 90% with Spot Instances) based on your utilization patterns, so you can further drive down your cost without compromising workload performance.