AWS Cost Allocation best practices: How high-growth businesses succeed

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AWS Cost Allocation Best Practices: How High-Growth Businesses Succeed

February 23rd , 2017

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Introduction

Today’s Topics

Cass Hodges Technical Account Manager

TODAY’S SPEAKER

1. A Story of Growth

2. Allocation Fundamentals

3. Using Tags & Linked Accts

4. Developing your plan

5. Q&A

$5B+in tracked AWS costs

With usage increasing, efficiency is key

Development Growth

$

Scale

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Using Tags And Linked Accounts

Here’s a little story all about how…

High-growth brings up all kinds of cost management and scaling challenges. Here’s a story from one of our own customers.

๏ International company analyzing data in different languages ๏ AWS power user experiencing intense growth over the years ๏ Growing pains around cloud cost management (trouble saving at scale) ๏ Cloud cost management wasn’t a priority, various billing data sources lumped into

massive spreadsheets

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Growing out of the spreadsheet-only method

Sorting AWS tagging leads to immediate reporting benefits, but also long-term cost efficiency for our customer.

๏ From “spreadsheet hell” into key cloud cost management reports to get quicker insights

๏ Solving this requires strategic and thorough tagging of resources ๏ Also requires adhering to tagging policies and automation for long-term benefits

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Putting strategic tagging and linked accounts to workHigh-growth brings up all kinds of cost management and scaling challenges. Here’s a story from one of our own customers.

๏ Retagged all AWS resources by departments, projects and teams ๏ Lowered chargeback time by running existing processes through Cloudability reports ๏ Fostered a culture of cloud cost management to teach the company to save on AWS

for the long-term as business grows ๏ Extended visibility into cloud cost management with views for specific non-technical

roles

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Question: What percentage of your AWS infrastructure is tagged?

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Cost Allocation Fundamentals

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Finding waste

You have lots of people that need to see your AWS costs split out lots of different ways

๏ By application ๏ By team ๏ By environment ๏ Across all of your accounts

The problem you’re solving

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AWS Cost Allocation At Your Company

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The Pieces

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The Pieces

๏Multiple major business units

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The Pieces


๏Dozens of products and cost centers

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The Pieces



๏Dedicated and shared AWS resources

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The Pieces



๏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 Players

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 Players

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 Players

Engineering/Product 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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Using Tags & Linked Accounts

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Tags

๏ Tags are key-value pairs (ex. color = blue)

๏ You can apply up to 10 tags per resource

๏ Tags can be anything you want or need

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Tagging: the fine print

๏ Tagging is not retroactive

๏ Tags represent a slice in time

๏ Tagging is case sensitive

๏ Enforce tagging with technology, not just policy

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Linked Accounts

Use linked accounts to split up things that really matter

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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

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Laying the groundwork

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First, get everyone involved

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Where to start?

๏ Focus on 3-5 required dimensions

๏ Develop a consistent nomenclature

๏ Aim to answer questions

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Answer questions

๏ What business unit of the organization should this be charged to?

๏ Which cost centers are driving my costs up or down?

๏ How much does it cost to operate the product I’m responsible for?

๏ Are there unused resources in my dev/test environments?

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Focus on Dimension

๏ Which business unit of the organization should this be charged to?



๏ Are there unused resources my dev/test environments?

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Maintaining consistency

Tag KeyEnvEnviornmentenviromentEnvironemntEnvironmentEnvironment EnvironmentTypeEnvironmntEnvrionment

Tag programmatically to ensure consistency

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Be sure to map together duplicate keys

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Tag everything you can

Cost Allocation

Where to start taggingBy tagging these three, you get a lot more than you might expect:

1. Tag Instances = Compute + Data Transfer 2. Tag EBS Volumes = Volume Storage + Data

Transfer + PIOPS 3. Tag S3 Buckets = Bucket Storage + Data

Transfer

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Use the Name tag for everything

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

๏ Tag RDS DB instances, snapshots, replicas, etc. ๏ With resource ID, naming is still important, as it describes what you are looking at.

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

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Question: How many of you have a tagging strategy in place?

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Cost Allocation Reporting

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Reporting & Automation

It’s all about dimensions

keys

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It’s all about dimensions

key

value

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Lets go back to our questions

๏ What business unit of the organization should this be charged to?



๏ Are there unused resources in my dev/test environments?

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What business unit should this be charged to?

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Which cost centers are driving my costs up or down?

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Which cost centers are driving my costs up or down?

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How much does it cost to operate the product I’m responsible for?

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How much does it cost to operate the product I’m responsible for?

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Are there unused resources in my dev/test environments?

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Are there unused resources in our dev/test environments?

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The cost of untagged resources

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Yeah, but what is actually untagged

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Finding Untagged resources with new Dimensions

๏ Resource ID adds a valuable level of granularity, and allows you to tag by expense of assets.

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Identify costs of specific storage engine costs

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Individual untagged EBS Volumes

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Create user-specific dashboards to keep allocated data top-of-mind

Taking it further

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Taking it further

Share reports with other users in Finance, Ops, and Engineering

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AWS Cost Allocation

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

๏ Use resource analytics to discover untagged resources.

๏ Share the reports with more than just finance

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Last Question: How many of you are going to reevaluate how you

tag your AWS resources?

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AWS Cost Allocation best practices: How high-growth businesses succeed