Question: What is the difference between AWS Billing Conductor and AWS Cost Explorer?

Answer

AWS Billing Conductor and AWS Cost Explorer are both tools offered by AWS to manage, analyze, and control costs, but they are designed for different user needs.

AWS Billing Conductor

AWS Billing Conductor (ABC) is an advanced AWS billing tool meant specifically for organizations and resellers that need to customize their billing and chargeback strategies. It's useful when you want to restructure how billing information is displayed to specific teams or customers, based on internal needs rather than AWS's default, account-level billing presentation. It allows organizations to:

• Group costs across multiple accounts and services.
• Apply custom billing constructs and chargeable rates, which means you can modify the prices and distribute discounts differently from how AWS calculated them.
• Generate customized billing outputs for internal chargebacks or for external customers (useful in a resale or large multi-account organizational scenario).
• Provide custom pricing visibility for teams or departments.

Billing Conductor doesn’t alter the actual AWS charges—just how they are represented for accountability or internal tracking.

AWS Cost Explorer

AWS Cost Explorer primarily focuses on analyzing and visualizing your AWS costs and usage based on the actual pricing structures. It's ideal for anyone who wants quick insights into their resource spending and trends without potentially needing advanced customizations.

Key features of Cost Explorer include:

• Detailed spend breakdowns by service, account, resource tag, region, etc.
• Custom reports and visualizations (like line items, pie charts, and time-trend analysis) to track costs over time.
• Resource recommendations to optimize expenditures, such as Right-Sizing suggestions for EC2 or RDS.
• Forecasting of future AWS spending.
• Resource utilization insights, making it easier to manage cost optimization strategies at a granular level.

Key Differences

1. Purpose:

   • AWS Billing Conductor: Tailored for organizations needing to manipulate and manage billing on a detailed level, creating custom pricing constructs that differ from AWS’s native pricing models.
   • AWS Cost Explorer: Focused on exploring actual AWS pricing and resource usage for cost optimization and tracking.

2. Customization:

   • AWS Billing Conductor: Allows customization of how billing data is represented internally (or externally, in a reseller case), such as applying custom rates, fee structures, or blends of service pricing.
   • AWS Cost Explorer: Provides tools and recommendations based on actual AWS pricing and usage data. Limited to modifying report views but not the underlying billing calculations or distributions.

3. Use Cases:

   • AWS Billing Conductor: More suited for large enterprises, managed service providers, or resellers needing refined chargeback and custom pricing visibility.
   • AWS Cost Explorer: More suited for FinOps teams, developers, and managers looking to analyze actual AWS costs, usage, and optimize expenses without requiring custom billing constructs.

Conclusion

AWS Billing Conductor and AWS Cost Explorer can complement each other depending on your organization's needs. While the Billing Conductor allows you to reflect costs in a manner aligned to your internal or external billing structures, Cost Explorer is your go-to-tool for cost analysis, trends, and optimization directly based on AWS's real-world pricing and recommendations.