5 ms·

i honestly cannot believe that this is still a thing! well, actually, i can. :( i run a large AWS consolidated billing family for a sizeable computer science

i honestly cannot believe that this is still a thing! well, actually, i can. :( i run a large AWS consolidated billing family for a sizeable computer science graduate research lab and tracking our AWS spends are an absolute nightmare. if you think about it for a minute, why would it be in the best interests of amazon/AWS to allow us granular, easy to parse and (most importantly) easy to customize and use billing reports? they're in the business of making money, and providing mechanisms for folks to limit their spends will limit profits. another thing to consider is that the billing subsystems for all of these cloud providers are literally one of the first things to be engineered, and after release, one of the last to ever be updated. for instance, it took amazon two years to release OUs (organizational units): one year in closed beta, one in open. while these are great for organizing accounts, you still can't see how much an OU spent w/o a bunch of python/boto gymnastics! i was on a call w/some of the leads of the aws billing subsystem about a year back, and asked about what the roadmap for billing features and the response was "2020 at the earliest".

user5994461 8y ago
What are you having troubles with? I find the billing page to be pretty good, once the tags are configured for billing. Far better than any internal tool I had the chance to work with.
- incomplete 8y ago
  we have a lot of projects, and i use OUs to track the N-ary tree of lab->project->people and their spends. since the aws billing subsystem can't map OU->$$$, i wrote a thing: https://github.com/ucbrise/aws-audit https://github.com/ucbrise/aws-audit it'd be also super awesome to have OU-based budgets. we use teevity ice when we really need to dig deep (https://github.com/Teevity/ice https://github.com/Teevity/ice) but it's pretty much abandonware at this point. i've also explored a couple of commercial offerings (ronin & teevity) but they don't work well in our AWS research credit-based model.
  - user5994461 8y ago
    I'm not sure about OU, didn't use them much. In commercial tools, I would have a look at https://www.cloudhealthtech.com/ https://www.cloudhealthtech.com/ and https://cloudcheckr.com/ https://cloudcheckr.com/ and there was a third I can't remember the name. They should have good reporting since that's the only point of the tool, but they charge an arm and a leg.
    - incomplete 8y ago
      those look just like the other services i looked in to, but w/o diving too deeply in to their whitepapers i can guarantee they use instance/resource tagging as the shim between AWS and their system(s). with consolidated billing, and a couple of hundred linked accounts (with plenty of turnover), enforcing a sane tagging is pretty much out of the question. thanks for the links tho! when i have a spare few minutes i'll definitely take a closer look.
      - user5994461 8y ago
        Consider revisiting your account strategy. Hundreds of accounts is way too many and it's unmanageable. Even a company with tens of thousands of employees couldn't have anywhere near that. Enforce some tags on purpose, team, business unit, dev or prod. It shouldn't be allowed or possible to create instances without any information. Enforce the rules, if an instance has no information it will be shutdown next week and deleted next month. People will take tagging seriously very soon. I've seen businesses who adopted AWS without any strategy and with revolving contractors as employees. A few months later, it's a hundred instances without a single name or tag, each one costing thousands of dollars a month for the more expensive. If the company cares about costs and resources management, it's easy to achieve. If it doesn't care, then doesn't matter, not your money.

user5994461 8y ago

What are you having troubles with? I find the billing page to be pretty good, once the tags are configured for billing. Far better than any internal tool I had the chance to work with.

incomplete 8y ago
we have a lot of projects, and i use OUs to track the N-ary tree of lab->project->people and their spends. since the aws billing subsystem can't map OU->$$$, i wrote a thing: https://github.com/ucbrise/aws-audit https://github.com/ucbrise/aws-audit it'd be also super awesome to have OU-based budgets. we use teevity ice when we really need to dig deep (https://github.com/Teevity/ice https://github.com/Teevity/ice) but it's pretty much abandonware at this point. i've also explored a couple of commercial offerings (ronin & teevity) but they don't work well in our AWS research credit-based model.
- user5994461 8y ago
  I'm not sure about OU, didn't use them much. In commercial tools, I would have a look at https://www.cloudhealthtech.com/ https://www.cloudhealthtech.com/ and https://cloudcheckr.com/ https://cloudcheckr.com/ and there was a third I can't remember the name. They should have good reporting since that's the only point of the tool, but they charge an arm and a leg.
  - incomplete 8y ago
    those look just like the other services i looked in to, but w/o diving too deeply in to their whitepapers i can guarantee they use instance/resource tagging as the shim between AWS and their system(s). with consolidated billing, and a couple of hundred linked accounts (with plenty of turnover), enforcing a sane tagging is pretty much out of the question. thanks for the links tho! when i have a spare few minutes i'll definitely take a closer look.
    - user5994461 8y ago
      Consider revisiting your account strategy. Hundreds of accounts is way too many and it's unmanageable. Even a company with tens of thousands of employees couldn't have anywhere near that. Enforce some tags on purpose, team, business unit, dev or prod. It shouldn't be allowed or possible to create instances without any information. Enforce the rules, if an instance has no information it will be shutdown next week and deleted next month. People will take tagging seriously very soon. I've seen businesses who adopted AWS without any strategy and with revolving contractors as employees. A few months later, it's a hundred instances without a single name or tag, each one costing thousands of dollars a month for the more expensive. If the company cares about costs and resources management, it's easy to achieve. If it doesn't care, then doesn't matter, not your money.