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Billing
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AWS Control Tower

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What is AWS Control Tower?

▪ Offers a straightforward way to set up and govern an AWS multi-account

environment

▪ Accomplished while following prescriptive best practices

▪ Orchestrates the capabilities of several other AWS services

▪ These include AWS Organizations, AWS Service Catalog, and AWS

Identity Center
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What is AWS Control Tower?

▪ AWS Control Tower orchestration extends the capabilities of AWS

Organizations

▪ Help you keep your organizations and accounts from drift using controls
(sometimes called guardrails)
▪ For example, control can be used to help ensure that security logs and
necessary cross-account permissions are created, not altered
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What is AWS Control Tower?

▪ AWS Control Tower provides orchestration layer that facilitates account

creation and account governance

▪ Enable you easily adhere to corporate standards, meet regulatory

requirements, and follow best practices

▪ Enable you provision new account quickly by using configurable

account templates in the Account Factory
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What is AWS Control Tower?

AWS Control Tower offers the easiest way to set up and

govern a secure, compliant, multi-account AWS environment
based on best practices established by working with
thousands of enterprises
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Features
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Landing Zone

▪ A well-architected, multi-account environment that’s based on security

and compliance best practices

▪ It an enterprise-wide container

▪ Holds all your organizational units (OUs), accounts, users, and other
resources

▪ All these resources are subjected to compliance regulation

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Controls

▪ A control is also called a guardrail

▪ It is a high-level rule that provides ongoing governance for your overall

AWS environment

▪ Expressed in plain language

▪ Types of controls: preventive, detective, and proactive

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Account Factory
▪ Commonly labelled as “vending machine”

▪ AWS Control enable you provision new account quickly by using

configurable account templates in the Account Factory

▪ Help standardize the provisioning of new accounts with pre-approved

account configurations

▪ Automates account deployment and enrollment

▪ Automates the process of applying controls and policies to those

accounts
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Dashboard

▪ Offers continuous oversight of the landing zone

▪ Allow you to see
- Provisioned accounts across your enterprise
- Controls enabled for policy enforcement
- Controls enabled for detection of policy non-conformance
- Non-compliant resources organized by accounts and OUs
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Resource Access Manager (RAM)
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What is Resource Access Manager?

▪ A service that enables you to easily and securely share AWS resources
with any AWS account or, if you are part of AWS Organizations, with
Organizational Units (OUs) or your entire Organization.

▪ If you share resources with accounts that are outside of your

Organization, then those accounts will receive an invitation to the
Resource Share and can start using the shared resources upon
accepting the invitation.
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What is Resource Access Manager?

▪ RAM eliminates the need to create duplicate resources in multiple

accounts. You can create resources centrally in a multi-account
environment, and use RAM to share those resources across accounts
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How resource sharing works?

▪ The owning account creates a resource share to share resources with

one or more consuming accounts

▪ With RAM, the owning account grants access for principals in the
consuming account to the shared resource

▪ Principals can be individual AWS accounts, the accounts in an

organization or an organizational unit (OU) in AWS Organizations, or
individual IAM roles or users
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Managed Permission

▪ Associate with each resource type that you include in a

resource share

▪ Determines what the principals in other accounts can do with

the resources in the resource share

▪ Specify the maximum permissions that can be granted to the

principals in the consuming account
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Pricing for RAM

There are no additional charges for using AWS RAM or for creating
resource shares and sharing your resources across accounts
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AWS Service Catalog

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What is AWS Service Catalog?

▪ New AWS users often face an overwhelming array of choices.

▪ These users might create stacks that do not comply with

organizational standards or guidelines.

▪ Certain users favour utilizing a self-service portal to initiate a selection

of approved products that have been predefined by administrators.
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AWS Compute Optimizer
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AWS Compute Optimizer
▪ Cut expenses and enhance performance by suggesting the best AWS
resources suited for your workloads.

▪ Assists in selecting the ideal configurations and adjusting the size of

your workloads, addressing both over and under provisioning.

▪ Employs machine learning to evaluate the configurations of your

resources and their usage metrics from CloudWatch.

▪ Reduce your expenses by as much as 25%

▪ You can export recommendations to S3

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Supported Resources

▪ EC2 Instances

▪ EC2 Auto Scaling Groups

▪ EBS Volumes

▪ Lambda Functions
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Savings Plan
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Savings Plan

▪ Savings Plans offer a versatile pricing structure that can lead to

discounts of up to 72% on AWS compute consumption.

▪ Reduced rates apply to:

▪ Amazon EC2 instances, no matter the instance family, size, operating

system, tenancy, or AWS Region.

▪ Usage of AWS Fargate and AWS Lambda.

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Savings Plan

▪ Savings Plans offer significant cost reductions compared to On-

Demand Instances, similar to the benefits of EC2 Reserved Instances.

▪ These savings can be realized by committing to a specific level of

compute capacity (measured in $/hour) for a one- or three-year period.

▪ Varieties: EC2 Instance, Compute and SageMaker Savings Plan

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EC2 Instance Savings Plan

▪ Offer the most competitive prices, with discounts reaching as high as

72%, comparable to Standard Reserved Instances (RIs).

▪ These savings come from making a commitment to use particular

instance families within a designated AWS Region (for example, M5
usage in Northern Virginia).
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EC2 Instance Savings Plan

These plans consistently lower expenses for the selected instance family
within the specified region, irrespective of :

▪ Availability Zone (AZ)

▪ Instance size

▪ Operating system

▪ Tenancy
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EC2 Savings Plan

▪ The ability to adjust usage within the same instance family in the same
region.

▪ For example: Transition from a c5.xlarge instance operating Windows to

a c5.2xlarge instance using Linux while still taking advantage of the
Savings Plans rates.
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Compute Savings Plan
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Compute Savings Plan

▪ Compute Savings Plans offer significant flexibility and can lead to

savings of up to 66%, akin to Convertible Reserved Instances (RIs).

▪ These plans are automatically applicable to:

▪ EC2 instance consumption, irrespective of instance family, size, Availability

Zone (AZ), Region, operating system, or tenancy.

▪ Usage of AWS Fargate and AWS Lambda.

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Compute Savings Plan

▪ Flexibility to adjust workloads without losing Savings Plans benefits:

▪ Example 1: Change from C4 to M5 instances.

▪ Example 2: Shift a workload from EU (Ireland) to Europe (London).

▪ Example 3: Move workloads from Amazon EC2 to Fargate or Lambda.

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SageMaker Savings Plan

▪ SageMaker Savings Plans have the potential to reduce your

SageMaker costs by up to 64%.

▪ These plans are automatically utilized for your SageMaker usage,

regardless of the instance family, size, component, or AWS region.
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AWS Pricing Calculator
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What is AWS Pricing Calculator?
▪ The AWS Pricing Calculator is a complimentary online tool that helps you
generate cost estimates for utilizing AWS services.

▪ You can utilize the AWS Pricing Calculator for various purposes, including:

▪ Designing your solutions prior to implementation

▪ Investigating pricing options for AWS services

▪ Examining the calculations that support your estimates

▪ Budgeting your AWS expenses

▪ Identifying potential cost-saving measures

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Example: AWS Pricing Calculator

▪ If you are already an AWS customer looking to add an EC2 instance for
weekly traffic spikes, you can enter your peak traffic details, select your
EC2 instance and payment options.

▪ The AWS Pricing Calculator will provide an estimate covering upfront,

monthly, and annual costs.

▪ This estimate helps you make informed decisions regarding AWS

services.
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Cost Allocation Tags

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Tags

▪ Tags are identifiers that you or AWS assign to resources.

▪ Each tag is made up of two parts:

▪ A key (which must be unique for each resource).

▪ A value (each key can only have one associated value).

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Tags

▪ Tags serve the purpose of:

▪ Structuring AWS resources.

▪ Monitoring AWS expenses closely through the use of cost allocation

tags.
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Cost Allocation Tags

▪ Activation is required for usage.

▪ Assists in organizing and monitoring resource expenses in your cost

allocation report.

▪ Streamlines the tracking and management of AWS expenditures.

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Cost Allocation Tags

▪ AWS offers two categories of cost allocation tags: AWS-generated tags

and user-defined tags.

▪ AWS automatically generates and applies the AWS-generated tags,

while user-defined tags are created and applied by you.

▪ Both types of tags need to be activated individually before they can be

displayed in Cost Explorer or included in a cost allocation report.
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Resource Groups
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Resource Groups

▪ Resource Groups in AWS are a tool that assists you in

organizing, overseeing, and automating the management of
your AWS resources by categorizing them according to shared
criteria.

▪ Form groups of AWS resources using tags or types of

resources.

▪ For instance: Compile all resources labelled with Environment:

Production or those associated with a particular project.
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Streamlined Management

▪ Execute bulk operations, like setting permissions or automating

tasks, across a collection of resources.

▪ Easily access and oversee resources within a group.

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Use Cases

▪ Arrange resources based on their application, environment

(such as Development, Testing, Production), or by team.

▪ Enhance cost allocation and reporting by categorizing resources

with relevant cost tags.

▪ Streamline workflows and management activities for designated

resource groups.
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Resource Groups are particularly beneficial in extensive

settings where various resources are spread across multiple
AWS services and regions.
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AWS Cost and Usage Reports (AWS CUR)

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What are AWS Cost and Usage Reports?

▪ AWS Cost and Usage Reports (AWS CUR) offer the most
detailed cost and usage information accessible within AWS.

▪ You can publish billing reports to an Amazon S3 bucket that you

control.

▪ These reports are refreshed daily and available in CSV format.

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What are AWS Cost and Usage Reports?

▪ Analyse expenses by:

▪ Hourly, daily, or monthly intervals.

▪ Specific products or resources related to products.

▪ Custom tags that you create.

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What are AWS Cost and Usage Reports?

Access Methods:

▪ Utilize spreadsheet applications such as Microsoft Excel or Apache

OpenOffice Calc to view reports.

▪ Retrieve reports programmatically through the Amazon S3 API.

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AWS Cost Explorer
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What is AWS Cost Explorer?

▪ AWS Cost Explorer is a resource designed to help you view and

analyse your expenses and usage.

▪ Investigate your costs and usage using the primary graph, cost and
usage reports, or Reserved Instance (RI) reports.

▪ Retrieve data covering the last 13 months and project your spending for
the upcoming 12 months.

▪ Get suggestions for acquiring Reserved Instances.

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What is AWS Cost Explorer?

▪ Recognize the aspects that require additional investigation and

comprehend cost trends.

▪ The Cost Explorer interface is accessible at no cost.

▪ You can retrieve data programmatically through the Cost Explorer API,
with each paginated API call priced at $0.01.

▪ Once activated, Cost Explorer cannot be turned off.

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What is AWS Cost Explorer?

▪ Predefined views show cost trends and allow you to tailor displays to
meet your preferences.

▪ It utilizes the same dataset that forms the basis of the AWS Cost and
Usage Reports, along with the detailed billing reports.

▪ To conduct a thorough analysis of the data, you can export it as a

comma-separated value (CSV) file.
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Billing Alarms
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Billing Alarms

▪ Amazon CloudWatch allows you to keep track of your projected

AWS costs.

▪ Your estimated charges are computed and transmitted to

CloudWatch multiple times each day as metric data.
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Billing Metric Data

▪ Located in the US East (N. Virginia) Region.

▪ Reflects global charges.

▪ Covers estimated costs for each AWS service utilized along with
the total amount.
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Billing Alarms

▪ Activate when your account charges surpass the designated

limit.

▪ Avoid using projections, as they only activate when the current

charges exceed the limit.

▪ If charges are already above the limit at the time the alarm is
set, it will immediately enter the ALARM state.
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AWS Budgets
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AWS Budgets

▪ AWS Budgets allows you to set custom cost and usage budgets.

▪ Alerts notify you when your budget thresholds are exceeded or

forecasted to exceed.

▪ Create budgets to track:

▪ Aggregate Reservation utilization.

▪ Savings Plans utilization and coverage metrics.

▪ Budget monitoring and notifications are free of charge.

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AWS Budgets

▪ The initial two action-enabled budgets are free each month, no matter how
many actions are set up for each budget.

▪ Any extra action-enabled budgets come with a daily fee of $0.10.

▪ AWS Budgets Reports allow for tracking the performance of your budget
portfolio.

▪ Reports can be sent via email on a daily, weekly, or monthly schedule.

▪ There is no charge for the delivery of each report.

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AWS Cost Anomaly Detection
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AWS Cost Anomaly Detection

▪ AWS Cost Anomaly Detection aids in minimizing unexpected

expenses and improving oversight while still fostering
innovation.

▪ It employs sophisticated Machine Learning techniques to detect

unusual spending patterns and determine their underlying
causes for prompt intervention.

▪ Set up a tailored monitor in three easy steps to get notifications

regarding unexpected spending.
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AWS Cost Anomaly Detection

▪ Allows developers to focus on construction while monitoring

costs and reducing billing uncertainties.

▪ Start utilizing the AWS Cost Explorer API or the Cost

Management Console.
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AWS Cost Anomaly Detection

▪ Alerts are delivered according to your settings via:

▪ Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS).

▪ Email.

▪ Summaries provided daily or weekly.