AWS Consolidated Billing Tips and Tricks

What is AWS Consolidated Billing?

Amazon Consolidated Billing is a feature provided by AWS for a user to group their bills from multiple accounts into one paying account. This enables enterprises to have a single paying account for their finance department, but still get a view of how much each sub-account has incurred:

AWS Consolidated Billing

Consolidated billing is purely an accounting and billing feature, meaning it is not for provisioning or managing resources. Also note that the paying account does not have access to the resources, the dashboard or the data in the sub-accounts. There is no cost for signing up to consolidated billing.

Why use AWS Consolidated Billing?

There are a number of good reasons why enterprises choose to consolidate their accounts into a single paying account:

From PaaS to IaaS: How we migrated off Heroku to RightScale

...and increased our flexibility and outage-proofing in the process

A few weeks ago, we moved PlanForCloud from Heroku, an-all-in-one PaaS, to managing it with RightScale. It was a smooth migration and we're very happy with our shiny new home in RightScale. In terms of cloud infrastructure, we're still using AWS, we've moved from a Ruby PaaS hosted by Heroku in US-East to an IaaS, and we chose US-West Oregon (with RightScale you can deploy to any cloud).

We used Heroku for our first year in operation and found it pretty good, however, we got to a stage where we started to outgrow Heroku. We wanted:

1. More Flexibility: ability to customise our stack, fine-tune our app's deployment process, get more visibility of our app's performance and be able to select instance types for different parts of our app. For example, we want to use high-CPU instances for our background worker processes.
2. Outage-Proofing: on Heroku, there is nothing you can do about outages; if Heroku has issues, you'll have issues, and you just have to wait for them to fix it. This is something we faced a few times in which the AWS US-East region had an outage and our entire app went down with it. With RightScale, we can control our deployment to a finer extent and can set up disaster recovery procedures which kick in as soon as any cloud outages happen.

Step By Step From Heroku to RightScale

Forecast HP Cloud Costs

PlanForCloud Adds HP Cloud to Multi-Cloud Cost Forecasting

There has not been a single cloud provider who can offer everything for every application and every user. Whether the focus is on cost, security, support or technology, each cloud provider comes to the table with a different offering.

With that, we would like to welcome HP Cloud to the table. HP Cloud servers, storage (both object and block storage), data transfer prices and support plans have been added to PlanForCloud. Here is the server selection page with HP Cloud selected:

PlanForCloud Server Selection Screenshot

AWS Reduces EC2 RIs an Average of 11%

Will RDS Price Reduction Follow?

Today, AWS reduced the price of its EC2 Reserved Instances. This applies to Standard (m1), Second Generation (m3), High-Memory (m2) and High-CPU (c1) instances. Cluster compute instances have not been reduced (cg1, cc2, hi1, cr1 and hs1). These prices only apply for users who purchase new Reserved Instances; old RI purchases are still on the old higher prices.

With these changes, AWS notes that on average RIs provide a savings of 65% from on-demand prices, so it’s even more important to make sure you are using Reserved Instances where appropriate. Check out our previous blog: Reserved Instances vs On-Demand: Breakeven point and use PlanForCloud.com - our free tool to help you assess costs of using the cloud.

Here is a summary of the Reserved Instance price reductions: