Speaking of AWS billing headaches, the previous article mentioned that Ultrapower Cloud Business launched a free, easy-to-use, and flexible AWS bill splitting tool that can: 1) Amortize RI prepayments, eliminate Credit infection, and restore true resource consumption and costs; 2) Split bills by user-defined business units such as applications, systems, and departments.

Long story short, this tool has been applied to actual work by multiple users, making cloud cost splitting more accurate and convenient, gaining recognition and welcome from user cloud administrators and financial personnel. As they used it, newer and higher-level requirement scenarios emerged. Ultrapower Cloud Business continuously iterated and launched corresponding new features, meeting with new and old users recently.

This article mainly discusses two new features.

First is the upgrade of allocation rules: As mentioned earlier, after assigning cloud resources to set business units, split cost reports can be generated by business unit; those network traffic, VPC, and other resources that cannot be assigned to business units or are shared by multiple business units can be allocated to each business unit by average or weighted rules. But some users said, we have many cloud businesses and resources, these public resources need to be shared among these business units, those public resources need to be allocated among other business units according to custom proportions, what should we do? This upgrade supports flexible allocation rule settings, allowing you to specify specific resource groups and business unit groups, customize allocation proportions, so users don't need to worry about how to allocate anymore.

Then there's the more important new feature: RI binding. Most users' RI purchases are targeted at specific resources for specific business units. For example, purchasing EC2 RI in the Tokyo region is intended for business A in Tokyo; only when business A can't use up the RI and has surplus can it be used by other businesses. However, AWS's RI consumption and accounting rules can only distinguish AWS accounts, not business units. This results in business B seizing the RI purchased for business A, while business A doesn't get to use it and is charged at OD rates. Although this logic doesn't affect payments to AWS, the accuracy of cost splitting for each business unit is reduced. For users with high RI coverage rates, split costs become distorted. This upgrade allows users to set the attribution relationship between RI orders and business units, and recalculate EC2 costs for each business unit, ensuring the accuracy of bill splitting.

Subsequent iterations will also launch advanced features such as automatic rules for determining resource attribution based on existing AWS tags, regions, and other attributes. Stay tuned.

For tool introduction, manual, and download, please see https://wiki.awstweaker.com/2019/10/24/aws-up账单拆分工具/.