Rationale​

We use Cost Management for controlling and optimizing our costs within AWS. The main reasons why we chose it over other alternatives are the following:

• It is a core AWS service. Once we start creating infrastructure, Cost Management begins to generate costs reports.
• It integrates seamlessly with all AWS services, providing fully accurate and granular reporting.
• It provides us with highly customizable charts that allow us to group costs based on attributes such as service, region, tag, linked account, among many others. In addition, it allows us to combine attributes.
• The charts support multiple time ranges that go from hourly to monthly granularity.
• The charts support multiple styles for readability.
• All the data used for generating charts can be exported for external use.
• It supports cost forecasting, allowing us to make predictions regarding future costs based on consumption during a specified time span.
• It supports report generation, which allows us to create and save customized charts such as "Monthly costs by linked account."
• It supports cost allocation tags, allowing us to group costs based on tags assigned to resources.

Alternatives​

• GCP Cost Management: It is directly tied to GCP, so we would have to migrate to use it.
• Azure Cloud Cost Management: It is directly tied to Azure, so we would have to migrate to use it.

Usage​

We use Cost Management for

• monitoring our AWS consumption constantly, and
• grouping costs based on product tags.

We do not use Cost Management for

• managing costs using budgets (our third-party provider for AWS does this for us) or
• monitoring costs using Cost Anomaly Detection (pending review).