Cost Allocation: Strategies to Split Up Your AWS Bill

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Splitting the Bill: AWS Cost Allocation

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Introduction

Today’s Topics

J.R. Storment Chief Customer Officer

TODAY’S SPEAKER

Get the presentation cldy.co/split-costs-deck

1. Tags and Linked Accounts

2. Developing your plan

3. Building cost reports (demo time)

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Infrastructure analytics for scaled web businesses and enterprises.

Cloud Infrastructure AnalyticsAbout Us

950M+ in tracked cloud costs. 10,000+ Users

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Our SolutionHow It Works

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Spend Management Spending visibility via monthly forecasts, dash-board, budget alerts, and daily email digests.

Cost Analytics Dig into your operating costs with detailed costs by tag, service, and usage type. !

EC2 Usage Analytics Spot under-utilized resources w/ instance level usage metrics. !!

RI Purchase Analytics Understand the exact combination of Reserved Instances that will maximize your savings. !

Enterprise Enablement Organizational group views/filtering/rollups, multi-user access. !

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We Collect We pull data directly from public cloud provider APIs.

We Store We warehouse your historical data.

You Access You log into cloudability.com to access analytics. !

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What's your primary driver for doing Cost Allocation?

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The piecesAWS cost allocation at your company

๏ 2 major business units

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The piecesAWS cost allocation at your company

๏ 2 major business units !๏ Dozens of products and

cost centers

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The piecesAWS cost allocation at your company

๏ 2 major business units !๏ Dozens of products and

cost centers !๏ Dedicated and shared

AWS resources

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The piecesAWS cost allocation at your company

๏ 2 major business units !๏ Dozens of products and

cost centers !๏ Dedicated and shared

AWS resources !

๏ Distributed teams using AWS

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DIFFERENT PEOPLE IN YOUR COMPANY NEED TO SEE THOSE AWS RESOURCES

IN DIFFERENT WAYS

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The playersAWS cost allocation at your company

Finance needs:

๏ Intra-month cost accruals for PO’s !

๏ Monthly breakdowns of cost by product, shared resource and environment !

๏ Chargeback costs throughout the organization

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The playersAWS cost allocation at your company

Operations needs:

๏ Breakdown of team/project AWS spending against budget !

๏ Alerts when teams/projects could be more efficient

!๏ Reserved Instance recommendations

to lower hourly AWS costs across teams/projects

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The playersAWS cost allocation at your company

Engineering needs:

๏ Daily breakdown of changing costs by project or revision !

๏ Their own spending broken down by resources to find inefficiency !

๏ Automated cost allocation reports for other departments throughout the company

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Tools for splitting costs

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1. Tags are key value pairs (key = value) 2. You can apply up to 10 tags per resource 3. Tag keys and values are case sensitive

#1: TagsTools for splitting costs

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Fine Print

• Tagging is not retroactive

• Tags represent a slice in time

• You can't tag heavy RI use

• Enforce tagging with technology, not just policy

Understanding Tags

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#2: Linked Accounts!Use linked accounts to split up things that really matter

Tools for splitting costs

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Tags vs. Linked Accounts

• Tags are highly flexible but 100% coverage is difficult due to compliance

• Linked accounts offer clean chargeback but limit reporting options

• Solution: Use Both with linked account splitting out most important divisions

Tools for splitting costs

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Developing your plan

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First, get everyone involved

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Three Rules of AWS Cost AllocationCost Allocation Strategies

1. Focus on 3-5 required dimensions

2. Tag systematically using a consistent nomenclature   

3. Aim to answer questions

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Questions to answerDeveloping Your Plan

1. What cost centers are affecting the bottom line?

2. What business unit of the organization does this spending fall under?

3. How much does it cost to operate each of my products?

4. How do version changes to my architecture impact cost?

5. Are we leaving things on or over-provisioning for our staging, test or dev environments?

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Tools for splitting costs

Tag KeyEnvEnviornmentenviromentEnvironemntEnvironmentEnvironment EnvironmentTypeEnvironmntEnvrionment

Watch out for inconsistency

Tag programmatically to ensure consistency

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Be sure to map duplicate keysUnderstanding tags

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Reserved Instance Pricing Components

Tag everything you can

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Use Name tag for everything

Use the same Name value across multiple resources to roll-up costs into a single line-item

!• Tag S3 buckets with Name to track storage and

bandwidth

• Apply the same Name tag to EBS that you’ve applied to its EC2 instance to get total compute cost

• Tag RDS DB instances, snapshots, replicas, etc.

Pro-tip: Concatenate Name Tag = Service-Role-Node

Understanding Tags

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Takeaways

• Use consistent nomenclature that answers specific questions

• Tag everything you can, and use linked accounts liberally

• Enforce tagging via technology like Cloudformation, Puppet, or Chef

• Use the Name tag for everything you can

• Share the reports with more than just finance

Cost Allocation

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Building cost reports (demo)

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