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Uni Cert / SAA-C03 / Cost visibility and governance

Cost visibility and governance

Cost Explorer, Budgets, tags, and optimization services for FinOps on AWS.

Estimated reading: ~22 min

You cannot optimize what you cannot see

Domain 4 (20% of SAA-C03) rewards practical cost decisions — not penny-pinching that breaks HA. Know the tools that find waste and the purchase models that reduce steady-state spend.

AWS Cost Explorer

  • Visualize spend by service, linked account, tag, API operation.
  • Forecasting — projected monthly bill.
  • Reserved Instance / Savings Plans recommendations based on historical usage.
  • Filter by Region, AZ, usage type (e.g. DataTransfer-Out-Bytes).

Exam: "Analyze spend trends and forecast" → Cost Explorer. Not CloudWatch (metrics, not billing granularity).

AWS Budgets

  • Set cost or usage budgets (daily, monthly, quarterly).
  • Alerts at thresholds (80%, 100%, forecasted overrun).
  • Can trigger SNS → email, Lambda, Slack webhook automation.
  • Budget actions — e.g. apply IAM policy or SCP when threshold hit (advanced governance).

Exam: "Notify finance when monthly AWS bill exceeds €10k" → AWS Budgets with SNS.

Cost Allocation Tags

  • User-defined tags (Environment=prod) — activate in Billing console for Cost Explorer reports.
  • AWS-generated tags (e.g. createdBy) — optional activation.
  • Without tags, per-team chargeback is guesswork.

AWS Trusted Advisor

  • Checks across cost optimization, performance, security, fault tolerance, service limits.
  • Cost checks: idle load balancers, underutilized EBS/RDS, old snapshots, unassociated EIP.
  • Basic checks free; full set with Business/Enterprise Support (know support tiers at high level).

AWS Compute Optimizer

  • ML recommendations for EC2, EBS, Lambda, ECS/Fargate — right-size or change instance family.
  • Uses CloudWatch metrics utilization history.

Exam: "Identify over-provisioned EC2 instances" → Compute Optimizer or Trusted Advisor cost checks.

Cost and Usage Report (CUR)

  • Line-item billing export to S3 — feed Athena, QuickSight, third-party FinOps tools.
  • Most detailed; overkill for simple alerts (use Budgets).

Organization-level cost control

  • Consolidated billing — single payer, volume discounts, shared RI/SP benefits across accounts.
  • SCPs — prevent expensive services/regions in sandbox OUs.

Exam mindset

Cost questions often pair with another pillar:

  • Cheapest and HA → not single-AZ to save money.
  • Dev/test → Spot, smaller instances, auto shutdown schedules.
  • Production steady → Savings Plans / RIs after baseline stable.

Official reference

SAA-C03 exam guide — cost-optimized architectures.

Official reference: AWS documentation

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