This chapter explains how AWS billing works, service by service: the unit AWS meters, the price that unit carries in Frankfurt, and the line it becomes in the Cost and Usage Report and the FOCUS export. Reading an AWS bill takes three things per service: the pricing dimensions, the usage types under which the usage appears, and the levers that change the amount. Every page of this chapter supplies exactly those three for one service or one group of services.

What this chapter covers

The chapters before this one explained how a cloud bill comes about, how billing data is structured, and what cloud services cost at AWS, Azure and Google Cloud side by side. This chapter stays with one provider and goes deep. AWS bills every service along its own dimensions: instance hours by family, size, operating system and tenancy; gigabyte-months by volume type and storage class; requests per million by tier; gigabyte-seconds for functions; gigabytes processed for logs and gateways. One architecture therefore produces dozens of differently cut line items, and many of them do not sit under the service you would expect: data transfer, public IPv4 addresses, logs and volumes are billed under product codes of their own.

Seven sections structure the chapter:

  • Compute and containers covers EC2, Lambda, and EKS, ECS and Fargate: the instance hour and its per-second billing, requests and GB-seconds, the cluster fee and its extended support surcharge.
  • Storage and databases covers EBS, S3, EFS and FSx, RDS and Aurora, DynamoDB, ElastiCache and OpenSearch: capacity, requests, provisioned performance and Multi-AZ multipliers.
  • Analytics, messaging and AI covers Redshift, Athena and Glue, the messaging and streaming services from SQS to MSK, and Bedrock and SageMaker: terabytes scanned, shard-hours, tokens and model units.
  • Network and delivery covers data transfer, load balancers and public IPv4 addresses, and CloudFront: which network boundary costs money and in which unit it is measured.
  • Observability and security covers CloudWatch, and CloudTrail, Config and the security services: gigabytes ingested, metrics, configuration items and events analysed.
  • Billing mechanics covers what meters no service but shapes every line: cost allocation tags and Cost Categories, AWS Budgets and Cost Anomaly Detection, AWS Organizations and consolidated billing.
  • Changes keeps, dated and sourced, what AWS has changed in billing, commitment programmes, export formats and price lists.

Every service page has the same shape: a table of pricing dimensions, the billing-data section with product code, usage types and FOCUS mapping, the levers by configuration, purchase option and architecture, the usual mistakes, an example in Frankfurt list prices, and the sources with the date they were read. List prices appear only where AWS publishes them with region, currency and date; the pages calculate in USD, the currency AWS invoices in, and leave the conversion to euros and pounds to the chapter on Europe.

Key terms

  • Usage type: the field that names what a line item metered; the key by which one service's lines are told apart in the data.
  • Line item: one row of the invoice or the export with usage, rate and amount; the unit each page of this chapter maps its dimensions onto.
  • Effective cost: a line item's amount after discounts and amortised commitments; what the levers move in the end.
  • Savings Plans and Reserved Instances: the purchase options that lower a unit's price without changing the unit; each service page names them in one row and points to the pricing chapter.
  • Data transfer: traffic across a network boundary, billed by AWS under its own usage type and often under a different service than the one that caused it.
  • Extended support: the surcharge for a version past its standard support window, a line of its own on EKS and RDS.
  • Tag: the key-value pair that assigns a line item to an owner once it is activated as a cost allocation tag.
  • Billing account: at AWS the payer account of an organisation, where the invoice arises and through which discounts are shared.
  • Credit: an amount AWS sets against the invoice, in an order the consolidated billing page describes.

Neighbouring chapters

This chapter assumes what "How cloud billing works" says about invoice, usage and rate, and builds on the AWS Cost and Usage Report and the FOCUS columns of "Billing data and standards", because every page here names the columns its service appears in. The purchase options that show up as one row on almost every page are explained in "Pricing models and commitments" with its pages on AWS Savings Plans and AWS Reserved Instances. "What cloud services cost" places each service beside its counterpart at Azure and Google Cloud; the pages of this chapter are the AWS half of that, at a depth a comparison cannot carry. A reader who wants to lower an amount finds the method in "Optimisation and savings"; one who needs the figures in euros or pounds and with VAT, in the chapter on Europe. The tools with which AWS itself shows cost are the subject of AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Budgets. How an AWS account is connected for cost reporting is on the AWS integration page.