Monitor Cost and Usage

Monitor Cost and Usage

Allocate costs based on workload metrics

Measure efficiency

  • Goal: Measure workload efficiency
  • Target: Within 6 months all Tier1 workloads must have efficiency dashboards, within 12months all Tier2 workloads must have efficiency dashboards.
  • Best Practice: Allocate costs based on workload metrics
  • Measures: % of workloads with dashboards
  • Good/Bad: Good
  • Why? When does it work well or not?: Ensures the organization is focusing on the correct metric (efficiency), and not the bill.
  • Contact/Contributor: costoptimization@amazon.com

Costs

  • Goal: Reduction in bill
  • Target: Reduce the bill by x% in the next billing cycle
  • Best Practice: Decommission Resources
  • Measures: Reduction in bill
  • Good/Bad: Bad
  • Why? When does it work well or not?: Does not drive improvement or capability building, can stifle innovation and positive growth. Does not factor in outcomes - ignores efficiency. Can have false positives - goal can be achieved by doing nothing if next months usage decreases, or impossible to achieve if next months usage is significantly higher
  • Contact/Contributor: costoptimization@amazon.com

Assign business value to costs & usage

Tagging

  • Goal: Add tags to all of our bill (where possible)
  • Target: No more than $100 a month of taggable spend, is to be un-tagged
  • Best Practice: Assign organization meaning to cost and usage
  • Measures: % of tag-able bill untagged
  • Good/Bad: Good
  • Why? When does it work well or not?: Helps add meaning to cost and usage, allows for adjustment between effort/reward with the % of bill approach, instead of using resource count.
  • Contact/Contributor: costoptimization@amazon.com