Introducing Cost and Usage Reports
New detailed reports provide greater transparency into the underlying AWS service usage of Ampt environments with 12 months of history.
Jeremy Daly
Cost still remains one of the most important factors when deploying and running applications in the Cloud. Cost optimization, while certainly not a new discipline, was suddenly at the top of everyone's minds after Dr. Werner Vogels' most recent AWS re:Invent keynote. He announced the publication of The Frugal Architect, a set of simple laws for building cost-aware, sustainable, and modern architectures. In particular, Law IV: Unobserved Systems Lead to Unknown Costs, and Law V: Cost Aware Architectures Implement Cost Controls, require understanding how your engineering decisions affect costs as well as putting the right tools in place to ensure they can be effectively monitored. Today, Ampt is excited to announce another major step towards automating cost optimization for our users.
With the release of Ampt's Cost and Usage Reports, users can now see detailed reports that show the total cost of every AWS service used by their Ampt environments. Users can drill down into the daily usage letting them calculate how their costs have changed over time, estimate future costs based on usage, and understand service usage to implement potential code optimizations. Daily cost data is provided for 12 months, giving users a complete historical view of their AWS usage. Note that reports are updated up to three times daily (which is a limitation of AWS's billing system) and may be delayed by up to 24 hours.
Providing Greater Transparency
Ampt deploys “Ampt Environments” to unique AWS accounts on our users' behalf. This gives every developer sandbox, preview environment, and permanent stage provisioned by a user its own secure bulkhead that completely isolates workloads in separate AWS accounts. Once deployed, user applications run entirely on AWS infrastructure, only using Ampt's orchestration service for additional monitoring and management access. Customers are responsible for their AWS usage, and having the ability to see and understand those costs are critical to providing the transparency necessary to optimize and control them.
Besides providing an amazing developer experience, Ampt's primary feature is analyzing user application code and automatically mapping it to a series of preconfigured, productized patterns that automatically implement best practices for cost, performance, and security. This dramatically reduces the cognitive overhead necessary to deploy most cloud applications, letting developers focus on building business logic rather than configuring infrastructure. Cost and Usage Reports is another step towards providing customers with a better understanding of how Ampt is provisioning and optimizing applications for them. There is more to do, and we look forward to your continued feedback moving forward.
What's Next?
We hope that our new Cost and Usage Reports will give our customers a clearer picture of how their applications are utilizing the underlying AWS resources. This is also just one step, with many more to come. We've implemented a significant amount of monitoring and cost controls that we are planning to make available to customers as well. Please be sure to join our community on Discord to share your thoughts.