AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR) is a powerful tool that provides comprehensive data about your AWS usage and costs, enabling you to make informed decisions about resource allocation, budgeting, and cost optimization. In this article, we'll dive into the AWS CUR and explore how it can help you unlock valuable cost insights and optimization opportunities.
The AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR) is a detailed breakdown of your AWS costs and usage, aggregated at an hourly, daily, or monthly level. The report includes information about the AWS services you use, the accounts linked to your organization, and the specific resources you've deployed. By analyzing the CUR, you can gain a deeper understanding of your AWS spending and identify trends, patterns, and potential inefficiencies that may warrant further investigation.
To access and configure the AWS CUR, navigate to the AWS Management Console and open the AWS Cost Management Dashboard. From there, you can enable the CUR and configure various settings, such as the report frequency, file format, and delivery location. The CUR is typically delivered to an Amazon S3 bucket of your choice, allowing you to store, process, and analyze the data according to your needs.
The AWS CUR provides granular data about your AWS usage and costs, including information about specific resources, such as EC2 instances, RDS databases, and S3 buckets. This level of detail allows you to drill down into your AWS spending and pinpoint specific areas for cost optimization. For example, you can identify idle EC2 instances, underutilized EBS volumes, or data transfer inefficiencies that may be driving up your AWS costs.
The AWS CUR supports cost allocation tags, which are key-value pairs that you can assign to AWS resources to categorize and track costs based on specific criteria, such as project, department, or environment. By incorporating cost allocation tags into your CUR analysis, you can gain deeper insights into your AWS spending patterns and allocate budgets more effectively.
AWS provides several tools that can help you analyze and visualize the data from your CUR, such as AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets, and Amazon QuickSight. By integrating these tools with your CUR data, you can create custom reports, dashboards, and visualizations that provide actionable insights into your AWS spending and usage patterns.
