AWS Cost Allocation Using Tags And Linked Accounts

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AWS Cost Allocation Using Tags & Linked Accounts

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Introduction

Today’s Topics

Aaron Kaffen Director of Marketing

TODAY’S SPEAKER

1. Allocation Fundamentals

2. Using Tags & Linked Accts

3. Cost Allocation Reporting

4. Q&A

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Infrastructure analytics for scaled web businesses and enterprises.

Cloud Infrastructure AnalyticsAbout Us

$1.5B+ in tracked cloud costs. 14,000+ Users

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Our SolutionsHow It Works

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Spend Monitoring Spending visibility via custom dashboards, budget alerts, and daily email digests.

Cost Allocation Segment your cloud costs with detailed reports by tag, service, usage type, etc..

Usage Optimization Spot under-utilized resources w/ instance level usage metrics.

RI Portfolio Optimization Get recommendations to buy, modify and sell the right RIs. Then see their impact on your spending.

Company-Wide Governance Organizational group views/filtering/rollups, multi-user access.

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Stage I: Cost visibility for all (emails, alerts, dashboards)

Stage II: Allocating costs to departments (tags, linked accounts)

Stage III: Using only what you need (underutilized, unneeded)

Stage IV: Lowering Cost Per Hour (i.e. Reserved Instances)

Stage V: Tying spending to the bottom line (unit cost)

The Five Stages of Cloud EfficiencyCloudability

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Stage I: Cost visibility for all (emails, alerts, dashboards)

Stage II: Allocating costs to departments (tags, linked accounts)

Stage III: Using only what you need (underutilized, unneeded)

Stage IV: Lowering Cost Per Hour (new families, Reserved Instances)

Stage V: Tying spending to the bottom line (unit cost)

The Five Stages of Cloud EfficiencyCloudability

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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

What’s your primary driver for Cost Allocation?

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Cost Allocation Fundamentals

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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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Using Tags And Linked Accounts

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

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Use the same Name tag 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

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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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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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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

๏ Share the reports with more than just finance

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AWS Cost Allocation Using Tags And Linked Accounts