Visualizing Your Eligible AWS On-Demand Compute Expense for AWS Savings Plan
One of the most common questions customers have is how to manage compute costs for resources like Amazon EC2, AWS Lambda, and AWS Fargate. Amazon Web Services (AWS) has many offerings to help you optimize spending, one of which is AWS Savings Plans. You can receive up to 72% discount off your On-Demand Instances usage, like EC2 Reserved Instances, in exchange for a commitment to use a specific amount of compute power (measured in $/hour) for a 1 or 3-year period.
Companies of all sizes face the challenge of gaining insights into organizational wide cloud cost. Typically, based on your annual estimated compute growth plans, you can often sign up for AWS Savings Plans. It happens sometimes that if you underestimate your compute needs and over time your On-Demand compute cost can grow beyond your original estimated Savings Plans. You can purchase additional Savings Plans anytime during the year. AWS Savings plan recommendations help you to understand what you can save, how the commitment will be used, and more. However, it does not dive deep into your daily On-Demand compute spend across individual member (linked) accounts. In this blog post, I will walk you through how to build an actionable Amazon QuickSight dashboard on ‘AWS On-Demand compute spent’ which is Savings Plan eligible.
Solution Overview
AWS services like AWS Cost and Usage report (CUR), Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), AWS Glue, Amazon Athena, and Amazon QuickSight are leveraged to build this solution. At a high level, we create the CUR with details such as Linked Account ID, On-Demand compute spend hourly granularity and choose Amazon Athena as the report data integration. Next, we integrate the CUR data with Amazon Athena using AWS Glue Crawler. Finally, we use Amazon QuickSight to build the dashboard using a dataset created via querying the Athena views.
The following image shows the solution.
Amazon QuickSight dashboard
With the following dashboard, you should be able to identify ‘Savings Plan eligible’ compute spend across all the ‘linked accounts’ in an Organization. You can create different visual types in Amazon QuickSight to best fit your needs. For example, you can create a pivot table and export it as an excel or csv file.
Implementation
For implementation details, refer to the following artifact that is publicly available at aws.amazon.com
Conclusion
For further reading, refer AWS Well-Architected Framework, Architecture Best Practices for Cost Optimization and Cloud Financial Management. I am here to help, and if you need further assistance in cost optimization of your AWS environment, please message me @ https://www.linkedin.com/in/arunchandapillai
