Enterprise Communications Featured Article

Amazon Web Services (News - Alert) (AWS) is a cloud computing service that offers a reliable, scalable and affordable solution currently being used by thousands of organizations across many different fields. The AWS platform is known for giving its customers exceptional granularity by providing data on how the system is delivering the service they require. The latest tool to provide this is Cost Explorer, a toolset designed to give AWS users the ability to manage their spending with more efficiency.

Cost Explorer was introduced as part of the new AWS Billing Console launched in November with features that included analytics, reporting and visualization tools to manage any cost associated with AWS.

The move by AWS to integrate a thorough cost analysis solution is long overdue, because of the increased number of organizations that are migrating into the cloud. Whether it is software-as-a-service (SaaS (News - Alert)), infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), OTT (over the top) media services or gaming, organizations that use cloud technology to deliver these services to their customers need access to spending management and optimization tools that allows them to see with great accuracy what they are spending.

According to a company blog describing Cost Explorer, the goal was to create a platform that was easy to use without requiring the installation of any software in your computer, because it runs in your browser. Additionally it automatically shows the current month’s expenditure while at the same time pre-populating the last four months so users can visualize AWS costs and use the information to determine spending patterns and analyze any trends.

The platform comes with preconfigured views as well as allowing users to define custom filters based on different criteria to let users analyze their spending patterns. This includes filters based on time, accounts, services and tags.

The preconfigured views include:

• Monthly Spend by Service – to see where money is being spent, and identify opportunities to save by changing usage patterns or taking advantage of service-specific pricing options
• Monthly Spend by Linked Account – provides spending visibility by linked accounts
• Daily Spend – a report that allows users to track spending as it happens without having to wait until the end of the month

Cost Explorer also delivers different tag (News - Alert)-based filters to let users analyze their spending across different custom dimensions such as cost of an application, cost center, functional group or region. It collects data across all different points and it can be accessed from the Billing and Cost Management section of the AWS management console.