AWS Cost Optimization Hub FAQs

Cost Optimization Hub is an AWS Billing and Cost Management feature that provides you with a comprehensive view of your cost optimization recommendations across your AWS Regions and AWS accounts within your organization, allows you to prioritize cost optimization recommendations based on estimated savings and implementation effort, and helps you to measure cost efficiencies.

Cost Optimization Hub reduces the complexity and effort of identifying, filtering, and aggregating cost optimization opportunities of your AWS accounts, workloads, and resources. You can enable Cost Optimization Hub, and the feature helps you answer fundamental cost optimization questions within 24 hours, such as: “How much can I save by cost optimizing my AWS environment?” “Which AWS accounts have the most cost optimization opportunities?” and “What are the top 3 strategies I can take to save costs?”

Key benefits include:

• Automatically identify and centralize your AWS cost optimization opportunities in a standardized data format. Cost Optimization Hub collects cost optimization recommendations from products enabled across your AWS accounts, such as EC2 instance rightsizing recommendations from AWS Compute Optimizer, and Savings Plans recommendations from AWS Billing and Cost Management, and aggregates these recommendations into a single dashboard, eliminating the need for time-consuming data discovery and normalization efforts.
• Quantify estimated savings incorporating your AWS pricing and discounts. Cost Optimization Hub quantifies estimated cost savings of your cost optimization recommendations, incorporating your specific AWS pricing and discounts, such as Reserved Instances and Savings Plans, so you can easily compare the cost impact of different recommendations.
• Aggregate and deduplicate savings across related cost optimization opportunities. Cost Optimization Hub aggregates savings among different types of cost optimization recommendations (such as rightsizing recommendations and idle resource deletion), so you can understand the deduplicated savings opportunities in each of your AWS Account, AWS Region, or workload.
• Prioritize your cost optimization recommendations with filtering, sorting, and grouping. Cost Optimization Hub allows you to create custom dashboards with filtering and grouping so you can easily identify the areas with the most savings potential within minutes. Cost Optimization Hub enables you to sort your recommendations by savings, and enriches your recommendations with implementation effort indicator, so you can prioritize your cost optimization efforts.
• Measure and benchmark your cost efficiency. Cost Optimization Hub provides you a measure of your cost efficiency by dividing aggregated estimated monthly savings of your cost optimization opportunities by your amortized monthly AWS costs excluding credits and refunds, so that you can understand and benchmark your cost efficiency.

Cost Optimization Hub supports over 15 types of cost optimization recommendations within AWS, including resource rightsizing recommendations and purchasing option recommendations. Cost Optimization Hub buckets these recommendations into the following cost optimization strategies:

• Rightsize: Move to a smaller instance type of the same CPU architecture
• Upgrade: Move to a later generation AWS product, such as moving from EBS io1 volume type to EBS io2 volume type
• Graviton migration: Move from x86-based instances to Graviton-based instances
• Purchase Savings Plans: Purchase Compute Savings Plans, EC2 Instance Savings Plans, and SageMaker Savings Plans
• Purchase Reserved Instances: Purchase EC2, RDS, DynamoDB, ElastiCache, and Redshift Reserved Instances

You can enable Cost Optimization Hub by going to the AWS Billing and Cost Management Console, click on the Cost Optimization Hub link in the left navigation bar, and click Enable. You can also enable Cost Optimization Hub via the AWS CLI or SDK.

You can identify areas with the most cost optimization savings potential by going to the Cost Optimization Hub summary page and setup your filters and group-by dimensions. For example, if you want to understand which AWS accounts have the most savings opportunities for EC2 instances, you can set the resource type filter to “EC2 Instance”, and group-by dimension to “AWS Account”. You will see a donut chart with a few slices in the summary page -- first 5 slices correspond to top 5 AWS accounts with highest estimated monthly cost savings for EC2 instances, and a sixth slice that aggregates savings for all other accounts. You can toggle to the table format, and you can see a table for account-level estimated monthly cost savings, ordered by savings in descending order. At the center of the donut chart, you can see aggregated savings across all slices.

You can group recommendations by AWS Region, AWS account, resource types, recommended action, tag key, is resource restart needed, and is rollback possible. You can filter recommendations by AWS Region, AWS account, resource types, and tag key.

Cost Optimization Hub identifies recommended actions that interact with each other, and reduces estimated aggregated savings based on the degree of overlap. For example, an EC2 instance can either be stopped or rightsized, but not both. When Cost Optimization Hub estimates aggregated savings for the EC2 instance, it chooses the actions that lead to the highest savings (in this case, stop), and ignores the savings from rightsizing. As another example, stopping an idle EC2 instance reduces the amount you can save through purchasing Savings Plans. Cost Optimization Hub proportionally reduces the estimated savings for Savings Plans recommendations based on the costs of idle EC2 instances that can be stopped. Note that estimated monthly savings is a quick approximation of future savings potential. The actual savings you will realize is dependent on your AWS usage patterns.

Yes. By default, estimated monthly savings considers your discounts with AWS, such as Reserved Instances and Savings Plan. You can customize the savings estimation mode to only consider AWS public on-demand pricing before any discounts.

Cost Optimization Hub assigns the implementation effort value based on the following factors:

• Whether a recommendation requires validation from engineering teams.
• Whether implementation of a recommendation may require restarting a resource.
• Whether implementation of a recommendation requires changes in operating system parameters, re-installation of applications, or updating application configuration.
• Whether implementation of a recommendation requires re-writing some parts of your application.