Understanding cloud invoices and billing data
One of the first steps to understand cloud costs is to understand how cloud services are billed. In this section, we will learn how to read invoices and cloud bills and understand how billing in the cloud works.
Understanding cloud billing data is not easy at all, and to do so, we must also understand the challenges we might face:
- It often requires a great deal of knowledge about cloud services and their cost drivers.
- Cloud providers constantly make changes, such as changing how a service is billed and publishing or retiring cloud services from their portfolio, which will impact billing as well.
- Billing data and pricing have a strong dependency on our agreement and current contract with our cloud provider. Prices can change over time depending on our contract.
- There are special purchase models, such as Reserved Instances and Spot virtual machines (which are priced differently from pay-as-you-go models). Using these...
