Diving into AWS Billing Data
Billing is an integral part of day to day AWS account operation, and to most it seems like a chore, however there is a lot to be learnt interacting with AWS Billing data. So why would you ever want to dive into AWS Billing data in the first place? It is pretty easy for both novices, and experience developers to rack up a sizable bill in AWS, part of the learning experience is figuring out how this happened. The billing data itself is available in parquet format, which is a great format to query and dig into with services such as Athena. This billing data is the only way of figuring out how much a specific AWS resource costs, this again is helpful for the learning experience. The Cost Explorer in AWS is great if you just want an overview, but having SQL access to the data is better for developers looking to dive a bit deeper. The billing service has a feature which records created_by for resources, this is only available in the CUR data. If you have already you can enable it via Cost Allocation Tags. These points paired with the fact that a basic understanding of data wrangling in AWS is an invaluable skill to have in your repertoire. ...