What is AWS Cost Management? - AWS Cost Management

Cost Explorer

Use case: Report, Forecast, Inspect

AWS Cost Explorer is a feature that you can use to visualize your cost data for further analysis. Using it, you can filter graphs by several different values. This includes Availability Zone, AWS service, and AWS Region, It also includes other specifics such as custom cost allocation tag, Amazon EC2 instance type, and purchase option. If you use consolidated billing, you can also filter by member account. In addition, you can see a forecast of future costs based on your historical cost data.

AWS Cost Explorer - Amazon Web Services

AWS Budgets

Use case: Forecast, Inspect

AWS Budgets tracks your AWS usage and costs. AWS Budgets uses the cost visualization that's provided by AWS Cost Explorer to show the status of your budgets. This provides forecasts of your estimated costs and tracks your AWS usage, including your AWS Free Tier usage. You can also use AWS Budgets to create Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) notifications for when you exceed your budgeted amounts, or when your estimated costs exceed your budgets.

Cost Anomaly Detection

Use case: Control

AWS Cost Anomaly Detection is a feature that uses machine learning to continuously monitor your cost and usage to detect unusual spends. You can receive alerts individually in aggregated reports, and receive alerts in an email or an Amazon SNS topic. AWS Cost Anomaly Detection is beneficial to analyze and determine the root cause of the anomaly, and identify the factor that is driving the cost increase.

AWS Cost Anomaly Detection - Amazon Web Services

Rightsizing Recommendations

Use case: Control

Rightsizing recommendations is a feature in Cost Explorer that reviews your historical Amazon EC2 usage for the past 14 days to identify opportunities for greater cost and usage efficiency. The feature identifies cost saving opportunities by downsizing or terminating instances in Amazon EC2. Rightsizing recommendations launched from Apr, 2020

Savings Plans

Use case: Purchase

Savings Plans is a flexible pricing model offering lower prices compared to On-Demand pricing, in exchange for a specific usage commitment (measured in $/hour) for a one or three-year period. AWS offers three types of Savings Plans – Compute Savings Plans, EC2 Instance Savings Plans, and Amazon SageMaker Savings Plans. Compute Savings Plans apply to usage across Amazon EC2, AWS Lambda, and AWS Fargate. The EC2 Instance Savings Plans apply to EC2 usage, and Amazon SageMaker Savings Plans apply to Amazon SageMaker usage. You can easily sign up a 1- or 3-year term Savings Plans in AWS Cost Explorer and manage your plans by taking advantage of recommendations, performance reporting, and budget alerts.