Improve Allocation Accuracy With New EBS Snapshot Visibility

AWS just announced better cost allocation support for EBS Snapshots. This is big news for organizations with significant spend on EBS volumes and snapshots. Learn how you can now quickly map all EBS Snapshot costs to the responsible business unit, cost center or application team to track these costs at their resource level.

At Cloudability, we drink our own champagne – meaning we use our own product to maintain a lean, efficient cloud. Looking at our own cloud costs that we track in our data engine, nearly 9% of storage costs are generated by EBS snapshots. With this AWS enhancement, we can now dig deeper into EBS costs and properly allocate snapshot costs to the teams and projects generating them.

Dive into Storage Costs Even Further

EBS, or Elastic Block Store, is a persistent block storage volume on AWS that you can attach to EC2 instances. It’s reliable, fast, and persists when you turn EC2 instances on and off to auto-scale your compute infrastructure. Cost allocation reporting for EBS volumes is available in Cloudability and can be accessed here.

Tagging for EBS Snapshots has been supported for some time but AWS had previously bundled snapshot costs into a single line item per region and account in the monthly DBR, making it impossible to report on EBS Snapshots at the resource level.

NOTE: Tagging EBS volumes can be challenging. Our Technical Account Manager delivers a few programmatic tips in this previous piece.

Improved allocation for EBS snapshots is a huge announcement and benefits enterprise customers that have large snapshot costs and no means to allocate them accurately. With a cloud optimization platform like Cloudability, you can now create an EBS Snapshot report in seconds, showing your most expensive EBS Snapshots per business unit, cost center or application team.

According to Michael Hoole, Senior Cloud Engineer at The Instillery, an elite exclusive Cloudability Partner, “EBS Snapshots are notoriously one of those things that you set up, you ignore and you end up paying good money for something you perhaps shouldn’t. Today’s announcement is huge. Now I can look through my entire list of EBS snapshots (item by item), prioritize by what is costing me the most money and eliminate completely unnecessary costs.”

We’re all about staying on top of changes in cloud storage and AWS. We already support EBS Snapshot tagging and cost visibility. If you’re a customer, get into the app and check it out!

Once you start tagging your EBS Snapshots, you can quickly surface resource-level reporting on them using our app. Here’s an example of breaking down EBS costs into tagged snapshot costs by Resource ID.

Use this kind of view to see which specific resources (and the teams which they belong to) are generating EBS snapshot costs.

This kind of report delivers a more granular look at your cloud storage costs and paints a better picture of which teams are generating this kind of spending. When you’re a large enterprise with snapshots by the thousands, these costs add up! Now you have the right means of finding the drivers of these costs.

“Being able to overlay key business dimensions captured with AWS tags will also help in this endeavor. Having this functionality available in Cloudability from day one is major for us and our customers,” said Hoole.

Give It a Try

Cloudability fully supports the newly released EBS snapshot resource visibility. If you want to put your own data to work, we have a Free Trial to get you going. If you’re still wondering about how to better tag EBS and other AWS resources, we have a free e-book to help you get started.