Vantage Launches cur.vantage.sh

Today, Vantage is launching cur.vantage.sh, a free website for the FinOps community that provides a comprehensive dictionary of terms that appear in AWS’s Cost and Usage Report (CUR). This publicly available microsite allows engineers, FinOps practitioners, and analysts to quickly search for AWS terms, such as “Requests-Tier-1” for S3 or “EarlyDelete-ByteHrs” for Glacier, and get an editorialized, simple-to-understand explanation for what the billing code means.

AWS’s Cost and Usage Report is the rawest presentation of billing data. It collects and aggregates all AWS charges across over 200 distinct services. Each service team at AWS defines its own consumption or usage-based pricing mechanisms. This has resulted in there being over 65,000 distinct billing codes that an AWS customer can incur. These billing codes can be obscure or difficult to understand, especially for engineers who are ultimately held responsible for optimizing these costs. Tribal knowledge of these billing codes may be known by a central FinOps team but, even then, there are new billing codes constantly being published that may be difficult to understand. Oftentimes, individuals attempting to search the web for what these billing codes mean were left helpless as there were limited-to-no resources available.

Now, everyone can access cur.vantage.sh, a free utility that gives people simple definitions of billing codes for every AWS service. There is a distinct page for each AWS service (e.g., S3 or EC2) that clusters together similar billing codes for that service, as there may be separate or distinct billing codes for each individual region. For each clustered billing code, the Vantage technical writing team has extensively researched and editorialized a simple definition of the billing code to help practitioners understand what the billing code represents. Here are a few examples:

• PaidEKSvCPUMonitored for Amazon GuardDuty Amazon GuardDuty offers Runtime Monitoring for EKS. When GuardDuty Runtime Monitoring is activated for a workload, GuardDuty begins collecting and analyzing runtime events for suspicious or potentially malicious activity. GuardDuty Runtime Monitoring pricing is based on the number and size of protected workloads, measured in vCPUs. EKS Runtime Monitoring also has a tiered pricing model based upon the total number of vCPUs monitored. There is a rate for the first 500 vCPUs monitored, the next 4,500 vCPUs monitored and finally a rate beyond 5,000 vCPUs monitored.
• TimedStorage-ByteHrs for AmazonDynamoDB TimedStorage-ByteHrs is the amount of storage used by your DynamoDB tables and indexes, for tables with the Standard table class. Storage is calculated hourly but priced monthly as calculated from an average of the hourly charges. Although the storage UsageType uses ByteHrs as a suffix, storage usage in the CUR is measured in GB and priced by GB-month. DynamoDB measures the size of your billable data by adding the raw byte size of your data plus a per-item storage overhead that depends on the features you have enabled. Storage usage values in the CUR will be higher compared with the storage values when using DescribeTable, because DescribeTable does not include the per-item storage overhead.
• SpotUsage-Fargate-GB-Hours for AmazonECS For interrupt-tolerant workloads, Fargate Spot offers spare capacity for discounted prices, but the drawback is that AWS can interrupt your process at any time when capacity is needed elsewhere. You pay only for the resources that you consume. There is one charge for vCPU and one charge for GB of memory used. This billing code is specific to the per-GB fee for Linux x86 architectures.

Head to cur.vantage.sh today to gain clarity on AWS billing codes.

Note—cur.vantage.sh is still a work in progress. We will continue to add descriptions for all missing billing codes. To contribute or suggest improvements, please go to cur.vantage.sh/suggestions.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is being launched today?

Vantage is launching cur.vantage.sh, a free site that provides a comprehensive dictionary of terms that are exposed via AWS’s Cost and Usage Report.

2. Who is the customer?

cur.vantage.sh is publicly available to anyone, including engineers, FinOps practitioners, and analysts.

3. How much does this cost?

There is no cost to use cur.vantage.sh, and you do not need to be a registered user of Vantage to access it. It’s a publicly available website.

4. How is Vantage generating the billing codes present at cur.vantage.sh?

Vantage consolidates anonymized customer data to retrieve the list of billing codes for cur.vantage.sh.

5. How is Vantage generating the editorial definitions for each billing code at cur.vantage.sh?

The Vantage technical writing team generates the definitions by carefully matching the code and description displayed in CUR reports to definitions found on the AWS pricing page.

6. How can I contribute or make a suggestion?

cur.vantage.sh is still a work in progress, to contribute or suggest improvements, please go to cur.vantage.sh/suggestions or join our Slack community.

7. How frequently will cur.vantage.sh be updated?

Updates will be made as we add and expand existing definitions and as AWS introduces new billing codes.

8. Is cur.vantage.sh integrated into the Vantage console for Vantage customers?

Not yet. That being said, the Vantage team is looking into linking directly from cost report subcategory references to corresponding cur.vantage.sh pages.

9. What columns do these billing codes and categories map to in the CUR?

The billing codes are mapped from the lineItem/UsageType field of the CUR. The categories are mapped from product/productFamily. For cases when there is no mapped category, we editorialize the category or name it “Other.”