Cost Management
Tools to estimate, monitor, control, and attribute AWS spend. The distinction is when in the lifecycle each acts.
| Service | When | Job | Key distinction |
|---|---|---|---|
| AWS Pricing Calculator | Before deploy | Estimate a design’s cost | Works with no account/resources |
| AWS Cost Explorer | After spend | Analyze & visualize history | 13 months history, forecasts, anomaly detection |
| AWS Budgets | Ongoing | Alert on thresholds | Forward-looking; alerts on forecast, can enforce |
| AWS Cost and Usage Report | After spend | Raw line-item data | Most granular; feeds Athena/QuickSight |
| AWS Billing Conductor | After spend | Custom/pro-forma billing | Reseller/chargeback rates, not your real invoice |
| AWS Marketplace | Purchase | Buy 3rd-party software on one bill | Vendor products, not internal tooling |
- Estimate (Pricing Calculator) → analyze (Cost Explorer) → alert (Budgets) → export raw (CUR).
- Cost Explorer (dashboard) vs CUR (raw source data behind it).
Other cost management tools
Services whose main job is something else, but that carry a cost lever the exam expects you to recognize.
| Service | Main job | Cost lever |
|---|---|---|
| AWS Organizations | Multi-account governance | Consolidated billing — pooled volume tiers, shared RIs/Savings Plans |
| AWS Control Tower | Landing zone with guardrails | Standardizes new accounts, so budgets and tagging start on day one |
| Amazon QuickSight | BI dashboards | Visualizes the AWS Cost and Usage Report for chargeback reporting |
| AWS Auto Scaling | Scale several services together | Capacity tracks demand, so idle capacity is never paid for |
| Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling | Scale an EC2 group | Terminates instances demand no longer needs |
| AWS Trusted Advisor | Best-practice checks | Cost Optimization pillar flags idle and underutilized resources |
| Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager | Automate EBS snapshots and AMIs | Deletes stale snapshots that would otherwise bill forever |
| AWS Backup | Central backup policy | Lifecycle rules move backups to cold storage |
| Amazon S3 | Object storage | Storage classes plus lifecycle policies cool data as it ages |
- The pattern: turn something off, right-size it, move it to a cheaper tier, or make the spend visible enough to act on.