One of the great things about cloud computing and AWS in particular is how easy it is to provision new resources, services and even entire environments. It's so easy in fact, that with autoscaling AWS will do it for you.
The downside of course is that each resource attracts a cost and you need to keep on top of these costs or they can easily get away from you and at the end of the month your AWS bill can come as a bit of a shock.
Even if you are reasonably sure of what is making up the bulk of your AWS bill, a lot of services are consolidated so you can't easily see what resources make up that total.
Being able to estimate up front what a resource might cost can be useful, especially when you are rolling out new infrastructure and you need to give your accounts people a warning of what to expect.
Luckily for Hava users, this information is readily available in the form of cost estimates.
With no resources selected on the network topology diagram, you will see a monthly cost estimate for the entire environment. You can expand the total to see subtotals for each resource type.
When you select a resource on the interactive diagram, the attribute pane to the right of the diagram changes to show the settings and metadata related to the resource.
This will show the individual cost estimate for the resource.
So you can go resource by resource and get an idea of what each resource is likely to cost.
Now that's all well and good if you have lots of time on your hands, but what if you want to know what all the expensive resources are, or which ones are making up the bulk of your AWS bill.
One of the "views" automatically generated by Hava is the "List View". The list view is a comprehensive list of all the resources discovered in your cloud configuration. This includes the resources visualized on the diagram as well as less important non-visualized resources.
The list view allows you to sort the list in a number of ways including by cost estimate. So if you sort the list by descending cost estimate, you will surface all the most expensive resources so it will become obvious if the bulk of your AWS bill is due to database instances, compute instances or something else.
This list is exportable in csv format which can be opened by any spreadsheet program which provides a simple method of getting your AWS cost estimates into a document your finance guys will appreciate.
So that's a quick run through how Hava can help you understand your AWS resource cost estimates automatically.
Cost estimates generated by Hava for AWS are also applicable to both GCP and Azure. When you generate GCP or Azure or even hybrid diagrams containing resources from a mix of AWS, GCP and Azure cloud accounts will also include cost estimate details as shown above in the AWS example.
If you would like to check out Hava with your cloud infrastructure, you can take free 14 day trial here:
