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I'd love it if at a glance I could see all of the AWS resources that I am using that cost me money, across all the regions. Right now I feel like I would have

I'd love it if at a glance I could see all of the AWS resources that I am using that cost me money, across all the regions. Right now I feel like I would have to poke into every menu option in every region across the entire set of AWS services to find out exactly what I'm using. The cynic in me wonders if this is not a priority for AWS because they make so much money from forgotten and hard to find resources that are being used and paid for but essentially lost in the interface. When I saw the new product name I thought "maybe this is it!"

iaresee 7y ago
Does the billing dashboard not cover your needs? With their billing query UI you can slice your billing data by region, service, etc.
- derefr 7y ago
  The billing API tells you about resources that have charged you, whereas I think the parent comment is talking about resources that are either “active” in some sense where they will charge you at some point in the future for the usage you’re accruing (but where this usage isn’t metered in a way visible to the billing API until it “commits” somehow); or, worse, resources which are “exposed” in some sense where they could charge you if they received a request, but happen to not have received any yet. (These resources are very easy to lose track of.) Another way to think of this question is “what is my current exploitable attack surface, against the ‘attack’ of causing AWS to charge me lots of money?”
  - jjeaff 7y ago
    They do only show what you have been charged, but to my knowledge this is update very regularly. It seems at least next day.
- slaman 7y ago
  and by Tag, which is the most useful way to organize your resources for internal billing/analysis. Don't see any missing functionality but our use case may not be complex enough.
- andrewstuart 7y ago
  Yes that's retrospective, I'd like to see everything in use now that costs money, with links to direct manage those resources.
dyu 7y ago
You can also check out https://divvycloud.com/ https://divvycloud.com/, which is similar and supports a few other clouds.
joshanderson 7y ago
It’s not in Amazon’s interest to make billing easy to understand
- eropple 7y ago
  This isn't really true. Billing opacity scares off small clients (it's one of the biggest reasons that, as a consultant, my clients leaned away from AWS) and can make larger clients consider diversification or divestiture.
dstroot 7y ago
I had a key compromise. They spun up resources across the world. I had to go on a safari to hunt and kill all the things they created in each region. I would’ve loved to of had a single view to see all the resources running across all regions. That would’ve been super helpful.
- mooreds 7y ago
  This might help: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsconsolehelpdocs/latest/gsg/find-resources-to-tag.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsconsolehelpdocs/latest/gsg/fi... Regions and tags are optional, which will show you everything.
kiwicopple 7y ago
I’ve been using komiser.io for this. I saw it here on Show HN about a month ago and have been using it ever since
pwarner 7y ago
3rd party services offer this for sure - https://www.cloudhealthtech.com/ https://www.cloudhealthtech.com/ - https://cloudcheckr.com/ https://cloudcheckr.com/ And several others.
sandGorgon 7y ago
This. This is one thing that GCP has done so brilliantly right - the projects structure. From an organisation point of view, this is the most seamless way of managing billing+access , instead of mucking about ARN crap. It's puzzling that AWS has still not been able to roll this out. What's so hard ? roll out projects and put all existing customers in a default project.
couterSpell 7y ago
Have you looked at AWS Config? Config gives you the ability to build asset inventories and be alerted when things change. It only works regionally, but it's better than nothing.

iaresee 7y ago

Does the billing dashboard not cover your needs? With their billing query UI you can slice your billing data by region, service, etc.

derefr 7y ago
The billing API tells you about resources that have charged you, whereas I think the parent comment is talking about resources that are either “active” in some sense where they will charge you at some point in the future for the usage you’re accruing (but where this usage isn’t metered in a way visible to the billing API until it “commits” somehow); or, worse, resources which are “exposed” in some sense where they could charge you if they received a request, but happen to not have received any yet. (These resources are very easy to lose track of.) Another way to think of this question is “what is my current exploitable attack surface, against the ‘attack’ of causing AWS to charge me lots of money?”
- jjeaff 7y ago
  They do only show what you have been charged, but to my knowledge this is update very regularly. It seems at least next day.
slaman 7y ago
and by Tag, which is the most useful way to organize your resources for internal billing/analysis. Don't see any missing functionality but our use case may not be complex enough.
andrewstuart 7y ago
Yes that's retrospective, I'd like to see everything in use now that costs money, with links to direct manage those resources.

dyu 7y ago

You can also check out https://divvycloud.com/ https://divvycloud.com/, which is similar and supports a few other clouds.

joshanderson 7y ago

It’s not in Amazon’s interest to make billing easy to understand

eropple 7y ago
This isn't really true. Billing opacity scares off small clients (it's one of the biggest reasons that, as a consultant, my clients leaned away from AWS) and can make larger clients consider diversification or divestiture.

dstroot 7y ago

I had a key compromise. They spun up resources across the world. I had to go on a safari to hunt and kill all the things they created in each region. I would’ve loved to of had a single view to see all the resources running across all regions. That would’ve been super helpful.

mooreds 7y ago
This might help: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsconsolehelpdocs/latest/gsg/find-resources-to-tag.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsconsolehelpdocs/latest/gsg/fi... Regions and tags are optional, which will show you everything.

kiwicopple 7y ago

I’ve been using komiser.io for this. I saw it here on Show HN about a month ago and have been using it ever since

pwarner 7y ago

3rd party services offer this for sure - https://www.cloudhealthtech.com/ https://www.cloudhealthtech.com/ - https://cloudcheckr.com/ https://cloudcheckr.com/ And several others.

sandGorgon 7y ago

This. This is one thing that GCP has done so brilliantly right - the projects structure. From an organisation point of view, this is the most seamless way of managing billing+access , instead of mucking about ARN crap. It's puzzling that AWS has still not been able to roll this out. What's so hard ? roll out projects and put all existing customers in a default project.

couterSpell 7y ago

Have you looked at AWS Config? Config gives you the ability to build asset inventories and be alerted when things change. It only works regionally, but it's better than nothing.