AWS Billing and Cost Management

AWS Billing and Cost Management is the service that you use to pay AWS bill, monitor your usage, and budget your costs

Analyzing Costs with Graphs

AWS provides Cost Explorer tool which allows filter graphs by API operations, Availability Zones, AWS service, custom cost allocation tags, EC2 instance type, purchase options, region, usage type, usage type groups, or, if Consolidated Billing used, by linked account.

Budgets can be used to track AWS costs to see usage-to-date and current estimated charges from AWS
Budgets use the cost visualization provided by Cost Explorer to show the status of the budgets and to provide forecasts of your estimated costs.
Budgets can be used to create CloudWatch alarms that notify when you go over your budgeted amounts, or when the estimated costs exceed budgets
Notifications can be sent to an SNS topic and to email addresses associated with your budget notification

Tags can be used to organize AWS resources, and cost allocation tags to track the AWS costs on a detailed level.
Upon cost allocation tags activation, AWS uses the cost allocation tags to organize the resource costs on the cost allocation report making it easier to categorize and track your AWS costs.
AWS provides two types of cost allocation tags,
- an AWS-generated tag AWS defines, creates, and applies the AWS-generated tag for you,
- and user-defined tags that you define, create,
Both types of tags must be activated separately before they can appear in Cost Explorer or on a cost allocation report

CloudWatch can be used to create billing alerts when the AWS costs exceed specified thresholds
When the usage exceeds threshold amounts, AWS sends an email notification

Consolidated billing enables consolidating payments from multiple AWS accounts (Linked Accounts) within the organization to a single account by designating it to be the Payer Account.
Consolidate billing
- is strictly an accounting and billing feature.
- allows receiving a combined view of charges incurred by all the associated accounts as well as each of the accounts.
- is not a method for controlling accounts, or provisioning resources for accounts.
Payer account is billed for all charges of the linked accounts.
Each linked account is still an independent account in every other way
Payer account cannot access data belonging to the linked account owners
However, access to the Payer account users can be granted through Cross Account Access roles
AWS limits work on the account level only and AWS support is per account only