AWS Billing and Cost Management documentation

What it is

The AWS Billing and Cost Management documentation is the official set of user guides for understanding, allocating and optimising AWS spend. It spans several guides that link to each other: the Billing user guide, the Cost Management user guide, the Data Exports user guide and the Savings Plans user guide.

The pages that matter most for FinOps

• Cost Explorer: exploring cost and usage by service, account, Region, tag and cost category, with forecasts and Savings Plans recommendations.
• Cost allocation tags: user-defined and AWS-generated tags must be activated before they appear in Cost Explorer and reports, can take up to 24 hours to show, and can be backfilled for up to twelve months.
• Data Exports: CUR 2.0, FOCUS 1.2 with AWS columns, cost optimisation recommendations and carbon emissions, delivered to Amazon S3 and queryable with SQL.
• AWS Budgets: cost, usage, and Reserved Instance or Savings Plans utilisation and coverage budgets, with alerts on actual or forecasted spend and optional budget actions. Budget data updates up to three times a day.
• Cost Anomaly Detection: machine-learning monitors that alert on unusual spend and rank root causes by service, account, Region and usage type.
• Cost Optimization Hub: one place for rightsizing, idle resource, Savings Plans and Reserved Instance recommendations across accounts, with savings estimated using your own discounts.
• Savings Plans: Compute, Database, EC2 Instance and SageMaker AI Savings Plans, on one- or three-year terms.
• Split cost allocation data: container-level cost for Amazon ECS tasks and Amazon EKS pods in CUR, including GPUs on EKS.

Why read the docs and not only a course

AWS adds and renames cost features often: Database Savings Plans, FOCUS exports and Cost Optimization Hub all arrived within the last few years. Courses lag behind; these pages do not. They also state the details that decide whether a report is right, such as when tags start applying and how often data refreshes.

How to use it well

Read one guide section, then do it in your own account the same day: activate a tag, create a budget, open Cost Explorer grouped by that tag. Cost features in the console are mostly free to use, but Data Exports writes files to S3 and querying them with Athena has small charges, so set a budget first.

Best for: anyone learning FinOps on AWS, from first budget to CUR queries.