Thread by @mike_julian

I've been neck-deep in AWS billing data all day and all the technical debt AWS has here is somewhat amusing.

And, also, I feel for them so hard.

Some things that stand out 🧵

UsageTypes have regional prefixes (eg, USW2-EBS:VolumeUsage.gp2 for gp2 EBS volume in us-west-2).

Except us-east-1, which has no regional prefix, so the UsageType is VolumeUsage.gp2.

This is true of every UsageType for every service in us-east-1.

Speaking of EBS, every volume type has a code associated: VolumeUsage.gp2, VolumeUsage.io2, etc.

Except magnetic volumes, which are simply VolumeUsage.

Likewise, io1 is VolumeUsage.piops while io2 and VolumeUsage.io2, thanks to io1 previously being called Provisioned IOPS.

The EC2-Other service is a catch-all of stuff: inter-AZ data transfer, EBS volumes, VPC Peering, Elastic IPs

Basically none of which belongs there but one can imagine when AWS was young, this made sense.

Managed NAT Gateway is also here, presumably for lack of a better place

Interestingly, data transfer charges are under a separate AWSDataTransfer product code in the raw data but not in Cost Explorer. Maybe we'll see that reflected in Cost Explorer one day.

S3 storage likewise has UsageTypes: TimedStorage-GIR for Glacier Instant Retrieval, TimedStorage-INT-FA for Intelligent Tiering Frequent Access, TimedStorage-SIA for Standard Infrequent Access.

Standard, however, is simply TimedStorage.

Even the name 'Standard Infrequent Access' seems to me to be a bit of technical debt, considering how many other tiers there are now. SIA's main difference is one nine less availability than Standard.

Some RI-covered instances show up as UsageType 'HeavyUsage' instead of InstanceUsage (RDS) or BoxUsage (EC2).

This is an anacronism dating back over ten years now, when AWS had light, medium, and heavy RIs that came with different discount levels

aws.amazon.com/about-aws/what…

Some services will bill for out-of-cycle billing charges, typically to cover overages or unmet commits from private pricing. They're typically grouped with the service incurring the fee.

Cloudfront, though, bills these through its own top-level service 'OCBCloudfront'.

Speaking of OCB, Enterprise Support is called Premium Support in the bill and also gets charged under a top-level service OCBPremiumSupport.

Cost Explorer shows this one as simply Premium Support, without the OCB bit (unlike Cloudfront).

And that's all for now. Back to the depths of hell for me now!

An interesting find that speaks to iteration:

Cross-AZ data transfer is UsageType XXX-DataTransfer-Regional-Bytes where XXX is the region code (or not for us-east-1!)

There now appears to be a UsageType XXX-DataTransfer-xAZ-In-Bytes, though it's currently being billed at zero

Notably, no DataTransfer-xAZ-Out-Bytes though.

I wonder if this is the start of replacing the usage type to make it easier to understand?