The Swedish Internet Foundation is an independent, private foundation that works for the positive development of the internet. They are responsible for the Swedish top-level domain .se and the operation of the top-level domain .nu
Buzzcloud and the Swedish Internet Foundation have a long relationship with many great AWS Cloud solutions.
Goal
The goal is to be able to follow up and analyze the AWS cost in a simpler and better way.
Prior to this the cost reporting consisted of using AWS Cost Explorer to manually generate a report that was then used to export a CSV file. The CSV file was then manipulated in an Excel file so it could be presented to the upper management and finance department.
Hopefully all these tedious steps can be eliminated, and a fully automated process can be accomplished.
Solution
This solution is fully automated and serverless.
The final dashboard shows both an overview of the current cost in many different dimensions and a historic view to get the trend of the cost.
Architecture
The architecture consists of the following AWS services:
- Cost and Usage Report (found in the Billing Console)
- S3 bucket for the Cost and Usage data (CUR files)
- Data preparation with Glue and Lambda
- Athena to build tables and views
- Quicksight to analyze, present the dashboards and send email with weekly reports
Below we have the flowchart of the whole architecture.
The Cost and usage report is provided by AWS and updated a couple of times per day. An update will trigger a Lambda in combination with Glue to adjust the tables in Athena if necessary. In Quicksight we have corresponding datasets based on the views in Athena. These datasets are then used to create the dashboards for both management and the teams.
Daily scheduled tasks will update the dataset in memory [SPICE] so that the Quicksight dashboards always are up to date and swift. This also keeps the cost to a minimum since the data queries will not traverse to Athena.
On a weekly basis Quicksight will email the managers a snapshot view of the current cost situation. A team specific interactive dashboard is embedded into each teams Confluence page. It will keep the teams aware of their cloud cost and they can optimize to save money.
Result
Dashboard controls can filter things like account, tenant, team and region. You can even download CSV of the current view if additional analysis are needed.
Example dashboard is based on mockup data
Interesting in knowing what we can do for your company? Contact us or fill out the form and we’ll get back to you shortly.
