The billing preferences – The first steps to taking control of your AWS costs

First you should enable access to the Billing and Cost management console. This can be done with the root account can activate this with the Activate IAM access on the Billing and Cost management console.

This is used to control access to the following:

• Cost Explorer
• Reports
• Rightsizing recommendations
• Savings Plans recommendations
• Savings Plans utilization report
• Savings Plans coverage report
• Reservations overview
• Reservations recommendations
• Reservations utilization report
• Reservations coverage report
• Preferences

Setup your invoice delivery and free tier alerts

• Activate the invoice delivery by PDF to email.
• Secondly, activate the AWS Free Tier alerts to the root email address. This is an important consideration. The email address that you receive the invoice delivery PDFs to, may not be the same as the root email address, which you used to sign up to the AWS services.
• Thirdly, activate the CloudWatch billing alerts.

Understand the billing AWS managed – job function

Research the following in detail:

• Grants permissions for billing and cost management. (This includes viewing account usage and viewing and modifying budgets and payment methods.)
• Note that the setting does not control access to:
  • The console pages for AWS Cost Anomaly Detection, Savings Plans overview, Savings Plans inventory, Purchase Savings Plans, and Savings Plans cart.
  • The Cost Management view in the AWS Console Mobile Application
  • The Billing and Cost Management SDK APIs (AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets, and AWS Cost and Usage Reports APIs)
    AWS Systems Manager Application Manager

Do you have multiple accounts? Then activate sharing of savings plans

Look into the possibility of sharing reserved instance and savings plan discounts.

Shared plans for EC2 instances to save costs

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AWS Organizations – The feature that can give you even more control if you have several AWS accounts

1. Open the AWS Organizations service and activate it. There you will see your organization ID in the left pane
2. To connect AWS accounts, you will have to send an invite to your other AWS accounts by using email or the AWS account id.
3. Then login to the AWS account that was invited to accept the invitation.
4. Logout and login back to your inviting AWS account which owns the AWS organization.
5. Now you will see new options on the page “Billing”.
   1. Credit sharing preferences.
      1. You can share potential AWS credits between your accounts that are members of your AWS Organization.
   1. Reserved Instances and Savings Plans discount sharing preference
      1. Here you can activate/deactivate the sharing of your savings plans between member accounts in your AWS organization.

Your AWS Organization will have a management account name and a management account email address. These will be the same as for the AWS account in which you created the AWS Organization.

Next section: Billing and Cost Management – The homepage at a glance