AWS Costs Cheat Sheet (Live and Interactive)

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About a month ago we posted a simple AWS Cost Cheat Sheet in PDF format and we got a lot of feedback that people found it very useful. In fact it was downloaded over 30,000 times!

We listened to that feedback, and today we are thrilled to launch an interactive and updated version of the Cheat Sheet. Check it out! 

Here’s what’s new:

  • Web based: It’s now a web app, so you can bookmark it, play with it, and we can keep the information up to date. The PDF we previously did was out of date as soon as AWS changed their pricing, which they do regularly.
  • Region Selection and Comparison: You can select any region and see the price table change. There’s also a comparison table that shows you the percentage difference between each region.
  • Currency Conversion: Select between US $, £ pounds sterling and € euro. We’ll add more as we hear what people want to see.
  • Select Time Period: Costs are normally shown in hours, leaving you to figure out how many hours in a day (easy), a month (less easy – how many days do you take? How many do Amazon?!) or a year. Select the time period and we’ll show you the cost for that region, in the currency you wise, for the time you want the server.
  • Spot Instance Price and History: Easily see the Spot Price right now, in the region you wish, and also see in that context of historic (since May 2012) average, high and low price.
  • Reserved Instances: See the hourly reserved cost, compared to on-demand or spot, and select what type to view (1 or 3 year, light, medium or high) and decide if you’d like to amortize the upfront cost of the life of the instance, reflected in it’s hourly cost.
  • Windows or Linux: View costs based on which platform you’d prefer. (We’ll add RDS if there’s demand for it – let me know in the comments)
  • Compare Reserved Instances: See the payback time, and the difference in reserved instance types and regions to help you make better purchasing decisions.

 

The spot price is updated every few minutes, and of course we update the service pricing every time AWS do. If you wish, you can enter your email address and we’ll notify you whenever there is a major price change.

We really wanted to make this a simple place to go to price check the Cloud. Please let us know at support@cloudvertical.com or in the comments if there’s anything you’d like to see added to make this more useful.

 

 

 

 

 

Customize your own Cloud Cost and Usage Reports

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Traditional IT infrastructure can be described with a few dozen metrics. When you move it to the Cloud, the amount of variables increases. Most users care only about a very specific subset of few key metrics though. We have learnt over the past year is that each CloudVertical user cares about a different set of key metrics. So we are really excited to announce that you can now create your own set of custom reports to track exactly what need to.

Often what users like to see in their Cloud cost and usage report depends on their role in the organization, it’s structure, the project they are working on, and sometimes the time of the year or month. There is no way we can provide a standardized report that would perfectly fit all those needs and – at the same time – remain usable and useful.

So while we do our best to deliver a number default views and reports so they suit all of our users, we are now giving you possibility to build your own. Continue reading “Customize your own Cloud Cost and Usage Reports” »

Reintroducing Tags

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When we first introduced resources tagging in CloudVertical, we’ve built our own tagging engine. It enabled users to tag resources directly in our application and then use those tags to filter presented data. We have been auto-tagging resources and syncing tags for AWS resources as well but this solution was not supporting native AWS key => value tag schema.

Since then we’ve learned that most of our users already had their tags set up as they wanted directly on AWS and they just needed them to synchronize properly with key-value relation support. Having learned that, with our latest tagging feature release we made it possible to use AWS Tag Key as a Tag Group in CloudVertical and tag values as tags in a group. Both of them are available for filtering data in all CloudVertical views.

Continue reading “Reintroducing Tags” »

AWS Cost Cheat Sheet

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UPDATE: We’ve launched an interactive version of the cheat sheet – check it out here

I get asked about Amazon Web Services pricing literally every day. I suppose it’s a factor of the job I’m in! The AWS Simple Calculator should come with a health warning for anyone who is not already an AWS expert, and the EC2 Pricing page is a resource I personally go to a lot, but it’s not a quick reference. We do a good job in CloudVertical (signup for a free trial) of helping Cloud users understand their costs but in terms of just putting together basic, high-level indicative costs for a solution – there isn’t really a simple ‘at a glance’ solution. We do TCO (total cost of ownership) models for customers all the time, and we may launch a public, automated ‘shopping cart style’ TCO and Cloud On-Ramp Calculator in the near future (hint!), but in the mean time, here’s a cheat sheet (PDF) I put together to help with basic, quick, cursory AWS pricing. Continue reading “AWS Cost Cheat Sheet” »

Teams, Sub-Accounts and Cloud Reports

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We know most Cloud deployments have multiple users, and many have multiple providers accounts within the company too. It can turn into a bit of a confusing mess to manage costs and usage!  With that in mind – we’ve launched the ability to add sub-accounts to your CloudVertical main account. So, if you would like to add your CEO, CFO, Procurement Officer, Development Team, IT Architect or Managed Services Consultant – you can now do that right from your CloudVertical account. Continue reading “Teams, Sub-Accounts and Cloud Reports” »

Odd AWS statement behavior for support charges

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The AWS statement is a wondrous thing. Relatively short in terms of the amount of data behind it – but not very easy to understand for the first year or so of seeing it! (How many people have been peppered with questions from the finance department about how to itemize it?!). We wanted to just outline one small issue today on how Support Charges are handled – in case you – like us – found it a little confusing.

Over the last few months we noticed that there is something on the AWS statement at the start of the month: the support recurring charge is shown twice – for example – once for November and one for December.

Continue reading “Odd AWS statement behavior for support charges” »

Introducing the CloudVertical API – programmatically access your cost and usage data

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While this isn’t the fabled AWS Billing API that no doubt is on the way, what we do with your Cloud cost and usage data is mine it for insights that help you reduce cost, forecast and manage budget, and control ‘who does what’. With that in mind, today we are announcing availability of the CloudVertical API, which will allow you extract data into your own tools or reports.

The CloudVertical app is built on top of this API – so it’s extremely powerful and detailed – and we’re ‘eating our own dogfood’. We’re really excited to see what mashups and new tools get built with this!

The API allows you to access resources via JSON requests over HTTP, using GET verb. The data is returned in JSON. A list of all the available requests are on the API Documentation.

Continue reading “Introducing the CloudVertical API – programmatically access your cost and usage data” »

Introducing EC2 Reserved Instances Analytics

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As we’ve mentioned in the past “the best way to think about Reserved Instance utilization types – light / medium / high is that you are BUYING a discount” but one issue we hear from customers regularly is how do you actively track Reserved Instance usage? We’ve seen many examples where multi-user AWS accounts have purchased Reserved Instances but do not necessarily deploy EC2 instances in the Regions with the reservations have been made.

Of course the most common metric sought is a comparison of EC2 total and On-Demand, to Reserved Instances (amortized over the purchase period) over time, so that you can visualize your EC2 bill as it reduces in line with increased use of Reserved Instances. If all this sounds like a familiar pain – keep reading and take a look at the screenshots below. If it doesn’t and you’re a heavy AWS user – please let us help you! Using Reserved Instances can save you huge sums off your monthly bill – anything from 30% to 70% !!

For starters, lets say you’d like to know how much was spent in each Availability Zone and what portion of that is using Reserved Instances. (This is a good measure of effective buying – for base or static minimum loads)

Continue reading “Introducing EC2 Reserved Instances Analytics” »

How to setup AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) for use with CloudVertical

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AWS Identity and Access Management is a web service that enables Amazon customers to manage users and user permissions in AWS. With IAM, each user is allowed to do only what they need to do as part of the user’s job.

CloudVertical now supports IAM, so you can use it to give us read-only access to your services. It’s really easy to setup:

1. Log into you AWS account: https://aws-portal.amazon.com/gp/aws/manageYourAccount

2.  Scroll down to the “IAM user access to the AWS Website” section.  Check both checkboxes on the right (“Account Activity” and “Usage Reports”). Click Activate Now button below checkboxes (do it even if the checkboxes were already checked!).

Continue reading “How to setup AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) for use with CloudVertical” »