👋 Welcome to Bill - the cost optimization bot

This Construct Library provides L2 and L3 constructs for resources to build AWS Cost and Usage reports using the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK).

⚠️ This is an early alpha pre-release version. The API will be subject to change until the library reaches GA status. Therefore make sure you use an exact version in your package.json before it reaches 1.0.0.

Please keep this warning in mind, if you already consider to use Bill in production environments!

🤖 About Bill

Bill enables AWS customers to proactively monitor their infrastructure costs and identify unforeseen expenses in a timely manner. Bill wants to prevent AWS customers from receiving bad surprises in their monthly bill. Therefore he addresses two primary problem areas:

cost history is not monitored on a regular basis
basic cost optimization best practices are not setup

Bill is a happy bot, if you...

...have more money in your pocket
...are enabled to monitor your spends proactively

How does Bill help you?

By analyzing your cost and usage reports, Bill will inform you about your monthly costs on a daily basis. This way, AWS customers will always have an up-to-date snapshot of how their infrastructure costs are progressing. AWS customers can then take direct action in the event of increased costs to prevent unintended suprises in their bill.

In addition to the daily status report, Bill enables various best practices in the area of cost optimization so that you can reliably control your costs. For example, by setting up multi-level AWS budget notifications or enabling cost anomaly detection and notification once anomalies are detected.

What are Cost and Usage reports?

The AWS Cost and Usage Reports (AWS CUR) contains the most comprehensive set of cost and usage data available. You can use Cost and Usage Reports to publish your AWS billing reports to an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket that you own. You can receive reports that break down your costs by the hour, day, or month, by product or product resource, or by tags that you define yourself.

Source: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cur/latest/userguide/what-is-cur.html

🚀 Getting started

This Construct Library requires the AWS CDK v2 (>= 2.1.0). Please follow the installation to install the AWS CDK.

Installation

You can install Bill in two ways. Either using the CDK library package or by provisioning a default and pre-packaged Cloudformation template with your existing AWS accounts.

CDK Library for Typescript

Bill can be added into your existing Typescript based CDK applications. Simply include the @cremich/cdk-bill-bot as a dependency within your application using either NPM or Yarn:

npm install @cremich/cdk-bill-bot --save-dev
# or
yarn add @cremich/cdk-bill-bot --save-dev

Cloudformation template

TO BE ADDED

🎉 Usage

Setup Cost and usage report export to S3

In order to receive cost and usage reports, you must have an Amazon S3 bucket in your AWS account to receive and store your reports. When using the CostAndUsageReport construct, an Amazon S3 Bucket is implicitly created for you.

⚠️ Please keep in mind, that cost and usage reports are only supported in us-east-1. The implicit created Bucket will then also be created in us-east-1 and defaults to the current stack's region.

import { CostAndUsageReport } from "@cremich/cdk-bill-bot";

new CostAndUsageReport(this, "cur", {
  compression: Compression.PARQUET,
  format: Format.PARQUET,
  timeUnit: TimeUnit.DAILY,
});

If you want to provision a custom Amazon S3 bucket, you can use the CURBucket construct and provide a reference to this bucket to the CUR construct. This gives you the flexibility, to provision the Amazon S3 bucket in another region while keeping the report provisioned in us-east-1

import { CostAndUsageReport, CURBucket } from "@cremich/cdk-bill-bot";

const curBucket = new CURBucket(this, "bucket");

new CostAndUsageReport(this, "cur", {
  bucket: curBucket,
  compression: Compression.PARQUET,
  format: Format.PARQUET,
  timeUnit: TimeUnit.DAILY,
});

Use AWS Glue to enable access to your report using Amazon Athena

After you created your report, you can provision a AWS Glue based data catalog for this. This enables Bill and you to analyze your cost and usage reports using Amazon Athena.

If you want to enable a data catalog on a new provisioned report, you can simply call addDataCatalog() on your CostAndUsageReport construct like

import { CostAndUsageReport } from "@cremich/cdk-bill-bot";

const report = new CostAndUsageReport(this, "cur", {
  compression: Compression.PARQUET,
  format: Format.PARQUET,
  timeUnit: TimeUnit.DAILY,
});

report.addDataCatalog();

This will create an AWS Glue crawler to crawl your report data, an AWS Glue database that references your metadata as well as an Athena Workgroup to enable you to query your data using Amazon Athena.

If you would like to enable a data catalog on an existing report, you can use the CostAndUsageDataCatalog construct independently and reference your existing S3 Bucket:

import { CostAndUsageDataCatalog } from "@cremich/cdk-bill-bot";

new CostAndUsageDataCatalog(this, "costs-catalog", {
  curBucket: bucket,
});

🤔 FAQs

Can I also use Bill in my multi-account setup?

TO BE ANSWERED

I already have an existing Cost and Usage report export setup. Can Bll reuse this instead of provisioning a new one?

TO BE ANSWERED

Does Bill also support E-Mail as a notification channel?

TO BE ANSWERED