Partner Billing Families -- General Availability

Following up on our coming soon announcement prior to AWS re:Invent 2018, we’ve released our Billing Families functionality to all partners. Our new billing block construct allows multiple combinations of standalone and consolidated accounts to be combined into a single customer tenant. In addition, the Partner Billing Engine can now pass through an entire consolidated bill that is owned by the customer.

This update was built to help our partners handle the more complex billing situations they are entering into with customers today. The goal is to make sure that billing reporting requirements don’t get in the way of you being able to sell services. 

Support for Additional AWS Services

As previously announced, we have developed a more comprehensive approach for extracting asset attributes from bills to allocate costs for AWS services using AWS and CloudHealth tags. We have updated costs for Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS), AWS IoT Device Defender, and Amazon Sumerian.

Previously, these costs were included in the indirect cost item associated with the respective service. Going forward, costs associated with the services listed above will be distributed into the following direct charges:

• EKS - Cluster Hours

• IoT Device Defender - Audit

• Sumerian - Storage

• Virtual Private Cloud - VPC Endpoint Transfer

• Virtual Private Cloud - VPC Endpoint Usage

• Virtual Private Cloud - VPN Connection Transfer

• Virtual Private Cloud - VPN Connection Usage

And the following indirect charges:

• EKS - Other

• IoT Device Defender - Detect

• IoT Device Defender - Other

• Sumerian - Scene Transfer

• Sumerian - Other

• Virtual Private Cloud - VPC Endpoint

• Virtual Private Cloud - VPN Connection

• Virtual Private Cloud - Other

For the services mentioned above, we will be using AWS Tags, CloudHealth Tags, and Resource Ids for cost and asset allocation because these services cannot have AWS tags. This allocation will be applicable to the past 13 months. We recommend that you update your reallocation rules for any ‘<service> - Other’ indirect charges. Learn more about supported AWS services in this Help Center article.

Support for Amazon EC2 P3dn Instances

AWS recently announced the latest addition to the EC2 Instance family tree: P3dn instance types. These instance types are now supported across the platform including cost and usage reports, Reserved Instance recommendations, amortization, Perspectives, rightsizing, and policies.

Update to Amazon EC2 Rightsizing

When you downsize a burstable performance instance, it is essential to select an instance size that fits the given average workload within its baseline instead of the total capacity. This is because CPU performance bursts above the baseline can draw your credit balance down to zero and incur additional costs in the case of T2 and T3 unlimited. In addition, if the instance type that you want after downsizing doesn’t leave any headroom while fitting required CPU workload under the baseline, it is highly likely that it will turn out to be more expensive than the instance type you had before downsizing. We’re excited to announce that we have enhanced our rightsizing recommendation logic for Amazon EC2 burstable performance instances to leave at least 15% headroom so that you are prepared for any unexpected increase in your application’s traffic.

Learn more about EC2 Instance Rightsizing in this Help Center article.

Amazon Reserved Instance Optimizer UX Improvements

We have revamped the budget input for the Amazon EC2 and RDS Reserved Instance (RI) Optimizers. This change makes it easier to produce best-case RI quotes without needing to update the budget for each change. Furthermore, there is now consistency for budget input across the RDS RI Optimizer, EC2 RI Optimizer, and the EC2 Convertible RI Exchanger.