Today, AWS announced the AWS Cost Optimization Hub. A new feature in AWS Billing and Cost Management that makes it easy for you to identify, filter, aggregate, and quantify savings for AWS cost optimization recommendations across multiple AWS Regions and AWS accounts in your organizations without any data aggregation and processing. It provides a single dashboard where you can interactively query cost-related recommendations such as resource rightsizing, idle resource detection, and purchasing options. You can find out how much you’ll save if you implement those recommendations and easily compare and prioritize based on savings.
Policy to opt into Cost Optimization Hub
The following policy statement grants you access to opt into Cost Optimization Hub by giving you access to create the required service-linked role for opting in. It also grants access to the Cost Optimization Hub feature to update the enrollment status.
{
"Version": "2012-10-17",
"Statement":
{
"Effect": "Allow",
"Action": "iam:CreateServiceLinkedRole",
"Resource": "arn:aws:iam::*
Also, currently, two AWS-managed policies exist that can help you get started with Cost Optimization Hub actions. One policy provides you with read-only access to Cost Optimization Hub, and the other policy provides you with admin access.
For more information, check out this link.
Let's enable it
First, navigate to Cost Optimization Hub's enrolment page. Then you will see a page like this:
Opting in to Compute Optimizer
For Cost Optimization Hub to import recommendations from AWS Compute Optimizer, opt into the Compute Optimizer. To enable it, navigate to Compute Optimizer, click the Get Started button, and then Opt in.
What can I expect to see?
Now that you have enabled Cost Optimization Hub, you can see the recommendations in the dashboard. The initial processes can take up to 24 hours.
After waiting enough for AWS to finish the initial ingestion and process of cost/usage-related data across different regions and all your accessible accounts, based on this article, you can expect to see recommendations similar to this in your dashboard:
To see the list of recommendations, choose View Opportunities.
If you select a specific resource, you can view details and even navigate directly to the representative console pages to take action.
If you are a command line guru, or if you want to quickly automate, you can also query through the AWS CLI or AWS SDKs.
Why was this interesting to me?
Last year, I built DigiWolk (service is permanently down - read further to see why), a cloud cost management platform to help companies have better visibility over what resources they use in the cloud and how to optimize their costs across all their accounts in their organization without sacrificing performance, security, or reliability.
As a non-EU citizen who resides in Denmark with a work permit, thanks to the stupidly bureaucratic EU/Danish/Dutch immigration regulations and xenophobic politicians who show no interest in welcoming non-EU talents and entrepreneurs, I could not get the required permission to start my company in Denmark and onboard customers (also tried the Netherlands), so after one year, AWS built the same thing.
Even though I am not happy that I could not start my company and help customers reduce their cloud costs, I am glad that AWS finally built this consolidated cost-optimization dashboard and made it available to everyone.
