NEW SERVICE ALERT: AWS Billing Conductor to monitor and reduce your AWS Bill

Overview

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of the most widely used cloud platforms. In this blog, we will discuss one of the AWS services, A.W.S. Billing Conductor, in detail.

AWS Billing Conductor (ABC) is a premium feature offered by Amazon. It helps to generate bills or invoices with customization capabilities. That means you can customize your invoices according to your requirements. Yes, you read it right. Curious to read more about it?

Let us get started.

Introducing A.B.C.

Amazon Web Services Billing Conductor is a fully managed service. It is a newly launched service that can be used to customize a pro forma version of your billing data every month. It will give you accuracy for billing that you can show or charge back to your end customers.

It does not change how you are charged by Amazon Web Services but can be used to customize, generate, or display rates to specific customers over a given billing period. A customizable billing service allows your customers to match their business structure.

You can create multiple accounts and customized rates as per billing parameters and use that in billing groups to create billing report for a customer as Cost and Usage report in each billing group

How Billing Conductor Works

• AWS Organisations: Create your consolidated billing family
• AWS Billing Conductor: Customize your billing data by account and rate to share with your end users
• Define billing parameters: Assign accounts to billing groups, define pricing logic and assign credits and fees
• Proforma billing computation: Generate and display cost data at your defined rates for each billing group
• AWS cost & usage report
• Reporting: View cost and usage data per billing group

AWS Billing Conductor can be used to Create

• Billing groups: The billing group in AWS billing Conductor can be used to organize your accounts. Each account can have only one billing group over a billing period. After creating a billing group will take up to 24 hours to see the group’s custom rates.
• Pricing rules: To customize your billing rates in your billing groups, you can create pricing rules. After applying the pricing rule to a billing group, it will take up to 24 hours to see the custom rates for your billing group.
• Pricing plans: To customize the output of your billing details across your billing groups, you can create pricing plans. After applying the pricing plans to a billing group, it will take up to 24 hours to see the custom rates for your billing group. You can attach a single pricing rule to multiple billing accounts.
• Custom line items per billing group: Custom line items can be used to manually allocate the cost and discount at your discretion. It can be calculated using flat charge or percentage charge values. Also, you can edit and delete custom line items.

Pricing

You have to pay only for pro forma billing records generated by you. There is also a second pro forma version of your billing records, with rate management, custom line items, and your desired account segmentation.

Pricing Explained with Example

As an example, imagine an account that an enterprise customer manages for a single tenant. Despite the reserved instance or savings plans purchased, the enterprise customer wants to bill an external client at public rates. Thus, the enterprise customer groups the three external client accounts into billing groups, recalculating $70,350.06’s worth of billing records. The total number of resources running in all member accounts in the billing group is 5,175. They are available for the entire billing period (31 days * 24 hours * 5,175 resources = 3,850,200 pro forma billing records).

The pro forma billing records generated would cost $427.53. (Price for 3,850,200 records generated minus 1,000,000 records covered from the perpetual free tier is   2,850,200 * .15/1000 records = $427.53)

Free tier:

You will receive your first one million pro forma billing records free of charge each month for your consolidated billing family. Thereafter, every additional pro forma billing record cost $.00015, or $.15 per 1,000 records.

Conclusion

AWS Billing Conductor service can help create a pro forma billing of the defined rate for each billing group. You can specify the billing parameters, like assigning accounts to billing groups, defining pricing logic, and assigning credits and fees. It will provide you with a cost and usage report.

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