In this article, I will discuss AWS Billing services that you should be aware of while dealing with AWS.
AWS Cost Explorer
Visualize and explore your AWS costs and usage
One of the most popular services for tracking how your services are charged is AWS Cost Explorer. By default, there is a report in your AWS account that gives a breakdown of the costs every day. All of these reports aid you in determining your current month's expenses and provide an estimate of the month's end costs. The predicted costs may be inaccurate since they contain some one-time expenses from the prior month.
AWS Billing and Cost Management Dashboard
This is the service you use at the end of the month to pay your AWS bills. All service charges are invoiced at the end of the month and billed within the first two business days of the following month. This dashboard also provides an excellent overview and breakdown of the expenses of each service. It's convenient to keep track of all your costs in one location.
Starting October 1, 2021, AWS will not automatically charge your default card, and recurring payments will be disabled.
Budget Reports
You may also keep track of your expenses by allocating a set budget amount that you intend to stick to. Once the budget has been established, you may keep track of how much your services cost in comparison to the allocated amount. You may also set up an automatic alert to notify you when your real expenditures exceed a specific percentage of your planned amount. This guarantees that you are not charged for excessive usage of the services. Even if services are being invoiced without your knowledge, you may still stop them so that you don't end up with a large charge.
AWS Cost Anomaly Detection
Your credentials may be hacked at times, resulting in unanticipated charges or services being started without your awareness. To address such instances, AWS employs Machine Learning to continuously monitor the services within your account, and once harmful activity are detected, it raises alarms and advises AWS customers to take urgent action.
AWS Pricing Calculator
AWS Pricing Calculator is a web-based service that allows AWS users to estimate the cost of operating services for a certain use case. You can add and delete numerous services that will be necessary to serve your use case, and a consolidated cost of all the services will be provided. This allows consumers to obtain a sense of their budget and if they should proceed with the services or not.
Migration Evaluator
This service is used to calculate a customer's Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Customers that now have their systems operating on on-premise servers or private data centres and intend to migrate to AWS will often select this option.
Conclusion
One of the most important aspects to monitor for profitability and success is the expenditure of all resources inside your account. While setting up an instance or resource in AWS or any other cloud, you should be fully acquainted with the many types of billing techniques provided by AWS. If you do not routinely monitor your account's charges and expenses, you may wind up paying greater bills since a few services may be invoiced but never used.