This course looks at the various tools in AWS that can be used to explore your cloud expenses and obtain detailed information about what causes them. We'll also look at how to identify costs use AWS to make a forecast based on the previous usage.
You'll learn how to visualize those numbers, in case you need to present and explain them. We will look at cost management best practices and how you can implement them in your own environments! This course is full of demonstrations from the AWS environment to ensure that you are able to use the services covered in the lectures.
Learning Objectives
- Use the billing dashboard to monitor costs
- Learn about AWS credits
- Learn how to use the Cost Explorer to perform cost analysis
- Understand how to produce cost and usage reports
- Learn how creating a budget in AWS can help you manage your costs
Intended Audience
This course is intended for anyone who wants to learn about the tools available in AWS to manage cloud running costs.
Prerequisites
To get the most out of this course you should already have a basic understanding of the AWS platform and its main services.
Feedback
If you have any feedback relating to this course, please contact us at support@cloudacademy.com.
AWS credits are applied to bills to help cover costs that are associated with eligible services. They are applied until they are exhausted or they expire. With credits AWS introduced a sort of reward system for particularly active users and developers. You can use them instead of spending money on certain services.
So you may ask yourself, "How do I get credits?" So, there are multiple ways. For example, developing and publishing a skill for Alexa or by attending webinars and events. As a startup, you can use the AWS Activate program or through the AWS Credit Program for Nonprofits.
In my case, let's jump here to the credits section, I did a few AWS certifications, and for that I was rewarded by AWS with two $300 credit vouchers which is pretty cool. I used them here for my private account to play around with a few services that I was interested in and as you can see here, you can see a list of which these credits can be applied to. And there are almost all services that are available for AWS. And what's quite funny is, the AWS cost explorer that can also cost money when you are using the API is not listed here. So, for the billing services and the cost services you can't use these credits.
Oliver Gehrmann is a FinOps Consultant and CEO of kreuzwerker Frankfurt, a German consulting firm with a strong focus on AWS, software engineering, and cloud financial management. He's worked in IT for over 10 years, facilitating the migration from physical servers in data centers to modern cloud infrastructures.
He and his team have experienced first-hand that costs in the cloud are becoming more and more of a challenge when about 2.5 years ago more and more customers approached them with this topic. Costs ran out of control and could not be addressed to business values.
Since that time, we have worked extensively on the topic of cloud financial management and have already been able to save our customers many millions of dollars. He now shares this knowledge in order to help others.