AWS Cost Allocation best practices: How high-growth businesses succeed

@cloudability
AWS Cost Allocation Best Practices:
How High-Growth Businesses Succeed
February 23rd , 2017

๏ @cloudability
Introduction
Today’s Topics
Cass Hodges
Technical Account Manager
TODAY’S SPEAKER
1. A Story of Growth
2. Allocation Fundamentals
3. Using Tags & Linked Accts
4. Developing your plan
5. Q&A

With usage increasing, efficiency is key
Development Growth
$
Scale

@cloudability
Using Tags And Linked Accounts
Here’s a little story all about how…
High-growth brings up all kinds of cost management and scaling challenges. Here’s a
story from one of our own customers.
๏ International company analyzing data in diﬀerent languages
๏ AWS power user experiencing intense growth over the years
๏ Growing pains around cloud cost management (trouble saving at scale)
๏ Cloud cost management wasn’t a priority, various billing data sources lumped into
massive spreadsheets

@cloudability
Growing out of the spreadsheet-only method
Sorting AWS tagging leads to immediate reporting benefits, but also long-term cost
eﬃciency for our customer.
๏ From“spreadsheet hell”into key cloud cost management reports to get quicker
insights
๏ Solving this requires strategic and thorough tagging of resources
๏ Also requires adhering to tagging policies and automation for long-term beneﬁts

@cloudability
Putting strategic tagging and linked accounts
to work
High-growth brings up all kinds of cost management and scaling challenges. Here’s a
story from one of our own customers.
๏ Retagged all AWS resources by departments, projects and teams
๏ Lowered chargeback time by running existing processes through Cloudability reports
๏ Fostered a culture of cloud cost management to teach the company to save on AWS
for the long-term as business grows
๏ Extended visibility into cloud cost management with views for speciﬁc non-technical
roles

@cloudability
Question: What percentage of your
AWS infrastructure is tagged?

๏ @cloudability10
Cost Allocation
Fundamentals

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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

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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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14
The Pieces
๏Dozens of products and cost
centers

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15
The Pieces
centers
๏Dedicated and shared AWS
resources

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The Pieces
centers
๏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.”

@cloudability
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

@cloudability
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

๏ @cloudability21
Using Tags & Linked
Accounts

@cloudability
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

๏ @cloudability26
Laying the groundwork

๏ @cloudability
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 Key
Env
Enviornment
enviroment
Environemnt
Environment
Environment
EnvironmentType
Environmnt
Envrionment
Tag programmatically to ensure consistency

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Be sure to map together duplicate keys

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Tag everything you can

Cost Allocation
Where to start tagging
By tagging these three, you get a lot more than
you might expect: 
1. Tag Instances = Compute + Data Transfer
2. Tag EBS Volumes = Volume Storage + Data
Transfer + PIOPS
3. Tag S3 Buckets = Bucket Storage + Data
Transfer

@cloudability
Use the Name tag for everything
Use the same Name tag value across multiple resources to roll-up costs into a single
line-item
๏ Tag RDS DB instances, snapshots, replicas, etc.
๏ With resource ID, naming is still important, as it describes what you are looking at. 
Pro-tip: Concatenate Name Tag = Service-Role-Node

@cloudability
Question: How many of you have a
tagging strategy in place?

๏ @cloudability37
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

@cloudability
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?

@cloudability
What business unit should this be
charged to?

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Which cost centers are driving my
costs up or down?

@cloudability
How much does it cost to operate the
product I’m responsible for?

@cloudability
Are there unused resources in my dev/test
environments?

@cloudability
Are there unused resources in our dev/test
environments?

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The cost of untagged resources

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Yeah, but what is actually untagged

@cloudability
Finding Untagged resources with new Dimensions
๏ Resource ID
adds a
valuable level
of granularity,
and allows
you to tag by
expense of
assets.

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Identify costs of speciﬁc storage engine costs

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Individual untagged EBS Volumes

๏ @cloudability
53
Create user-specific dashboards to keep allocated data top-of-mind
Taking it further

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54
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
๏ Use resource analytics to discover untagged resources. 
๏ Share the reports with more than just ﬁnance

@cloudability
Last Question: How many of you
are going to reevaluate how you
tag your AWS resources?

@cloudability
Thank you!
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demo@cloudability.com

AWS Cost Allocation best practices: How high-growth businesses succeed

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AWS Cost Allocation best practices: How high-growth businesses succeed