Question: What is the difference between AWS Compute Optimizer and AWS Cost Explorer?

Answer

AWS offers several tools to help optimize costs, among which AWS Compute Optimizer and AWS Cost Explorer are widely used. While both services aim to reduce expenditure, they focus on different aspects of cost management, and understanding their differences is key to leveraging the best of AWS for cost optimization.

AWS Compute Optimizer

AWS Compute Optimizer analyzes your AWS resource usage and provides recommendations for resource rightsizing. It primarily focuses on optimizing the performance and cost-efficiency of your EC2, Auto Scaling groups, EBS, and Lambda usage. Compute Optimizer uses machine learning models based on historical data to suggest ways to reduce costs and improve performance.

Key features of AWS Compute Optimizer include:

1. EC2 Instance Type Recommendations: Recommend moving to more cost-effective EC2 instances based on your historical utilization (CPU, Memory, and network).
2. EBS Volume Recommendations: Analyze EBS IOPS and throughput utilization and suggest downsizing or changing the volume type for reduced costs.
3. Auto Scaling Group Recommendations: Review Auto Scaling configurations and recommend scaling adjustments that could result in better resource efficiency and savings.
4. Lambda Function Recommendations: Provide optimization suggestions based on the performance metrics of Lambda functions, such as handling more requests with less memory allocation.
5. RI and Savings Plans Support: Though Compute Optimizer primarily focuses on performance optimization, it can complement savings plans or reserved instance purchases by ensuring you're using the correct resource configurations.

AWS Cost Explorer

AWS Cost Explorer, on the other hand, is a tool designed specifically to help you visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs. It provides insights into historical spending patterns and helps forecast future costs, giving you the ability to track usage trends and identify areas to cut down spending.

Key features of AWS Cost Explorer include:

1. Cost & Usage Reports: Detailed visibility into resource-level cost and usage data over time, such as per-service, per-region, or per-account.
2. Savings Plans and Reserved Instances Utilization: Analyze and optimize the utilization of pre-purchased Reserved Instances (RIs) and Savings Plans, identifying areas of potential cost savings.
3. Tag-Based Cost Allocation: Use tagging for a more granular breakdown of how costs are distributed across various projects or teams, facilitating better budget management.
4. Forecasting & Budgeting: Use historical data to project your future AWS costs. Set up custom budgets and track if your costs are exceeding defined limits.
5. Custom Reports: Create custom reports to track costs for specific time frames, services, or regions.

Key Differences

Here’s how AWS Compute Optimizer and Cost Explorer differ:

1. Purpose:

   • Compute Optimizer: Focuses on resource rightsizing and performance optimization.
   • Cost Explorer: Focuses on cost tracking, visualization, and projecting future usage.

2. Scope:

   • Compute Optimizer: Limited to compute-related services like EC2, Auto Scaling Groups, Lambda, and EBS.
   • Cost Explorer: Covers a broader range of AWS services in terms of cost analysis.

3. Actionability:

   • Compute Optimizer: Provides action-oriented recommendations to rightsize resources.
   • Cost Explorer: Primarily provides cost insights and trends but doesn’t suggest specific changes to AWS resources.

4. Optimization:

   • Compute Optimizer: Focuses on optimizing resource usage to reduce costs indirectly by improving performance.
   • Cost Explorer: Focuses on direct cost optimization through identifying spending patterns and potential savings on RIs or Savings Plans.

Conclusion

In summary, AWS Compute Optimizer is focused on helping you optimize your computational resources based on historical performance and utilization to ultimately improve both performance and cost-efficiency. AWS Cost Explorer, on the other hand, provides detailed analytics and insights into your spending patterns, helping you track and forecast costs across a wider range of AWS services.

To achieve comprehensive AWS cost optimization, it’s often beneficial to use both tools in tandem—Cost Explorer for understanding and visualizing costs and Compute Optimizer for implementing resource-specific optimizations.