We are writing to inform you of a specific change to the Cost (Total) metric in Cloudability that will have a limited impact to some of our customers monitoring AWS spend. This update is part of our ongoing commitment to provide clear, straightforward, and accurate financial metrics. The change only impacts line items that relate to no upfront and partial upfront reserved instances (RI), and does not impact figures at the aggregate level. Before we describe these changes a quick reminder of the purpose of each key Cloudability cost metric:
Although the goal of cost (total) was always to deliver an unadulterated representation of the invoice cost – the “lineItem/UnblendedCost” column in the CUR file – there was one exception to this, implemented at the time to support a consistent transition between the DBR and CUR files. Logic was applied to these two item types:
This had the net effect of ensuring that usage line items had the consumed RI value assigned to them, instead of a zero value – i.e., it moved cost from the monthly recurring lines to the usage lines. This had the benefit of maintaining consistent behaviour with the older, now deprecated, DBR file but had the downside of cost (total) not being a pure “pass through” cash metric.
From January 2024, these special rules for the Cost (Total) metric will be removed. From that point onwards this metric will directly reflect the lineItem/UnblendedCost column. As mentioned, this won’t impact the aggregate figures or individual line items outside the two noted above. This change will benefit our AWS customers, improving the clarity of our cost metrics and simplifying some reconciliation efforts.
We are planning to implement this change in early January. If you have any questions or require assistance, please do reach out to us. If you need historical data reprocessed under the new method, please contact us for support.
Thanks Andrew.
Hi @Canlee Wong, there was no impact on the cost amortized metric with this update. That should still reflect exactly what has been used/unused including any associated upfront components.
In the case of any Unused Reservations, would this change impact the Cost Amort?
I notice the Cost Amort for Unused RI is not within normal, but yet to investigate. Possibly January data still reprocessing due to Multi Currency issue early this week.
Thanks,
Great question @Marimuthu Senthilkumaran,
Firstly, this change has gone through for all customers - if you have no upfront or partial upfront RIs then you should be able to surface the impact.
Regarding Unblended versus NetUnblended metrics, there is a bit to unpack there. In this post I intentionally avoided the NetUnblended topic since not all AWS customers will have an EDP or be enrolled in the automated discount program (and therefore won't have the NetUnblended column). In any case, these two metrics will align at the invoice level, since AWS adds bulk credit lines that adjust the unblended column. Another way of looking at it: The Cloudability metric Cost (Adjusted) can be considered the "invoice metric" if you are in a discount program and wish to have the discounts applied inline. This metric also no longer has the DBR style rules applied to it.