Contributions by Lucas Paratore
Deploying workloads on the public cloud can become surprisingly expensive. How do the costs get so high? Often, overlooked expenses add up fast, and AWS Extended Support is a prime example.
In October 2023, Amazon EKS announced a $0.60 per cluster, per hour charge for Amazon EKS extended support for Kubernetes versions 1.23 and higher. This will apply in all commercial regions, effective from the April 2024 billing cycle. Similarly, Amazon RDS extended support charges apply to MySQL version 5.7 and Postgres version 11 starting March 1, 2024.
So, what exactly are Extended Support charges? AWS applies these fees to resources running on versions no longer covered by standard support. This means you will incur additional costs to continue using those resources. These charges can span services and easily amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars for large enterprises. AWS provides a 1 to 3 year grace period for users to migrate to a newer version with standard support, avoiding these extra charges. After extended support ends, AWS will automatically migrate/upgrade your resources to a supported version.
If you are feeling anxious about keeping track of these changes, we get it. They’re complicated. Tanzu CloudHealth has your back! We can help you navigate these complexities by providing you the tools to view your cost and usage data at a granular level, including your extended support charges and impacted resources.
FlexReports to the rescue
Tanzu CloudHealth’s FlexReports offers a powerful solution to aggregating datasets in the platform. Using FlexReports, customers can easily build reports across various dimensions to perform more granular analysis on cost, usage, and asset data. These reports will help you answer questions relevant to your business needs, such as viewing costs for a specific month organized by AWS Account, Service Item, and Charge Type. In the case of AWS Extended Support charges, FlexReports can provide a detailed understanding of the charges you have incurred that otherwise may have slipped under the radar.
To find how much you have been charged for Extended Support for the current and previous month, grouped by the Product code,follow these simple steps:
1) Navigate to the FlexReports features (under Reports) and click on the “New Report” Button on the top right corner or click this link (requires platform authentication).
2) Give your report a descriptive name like “AWS Extended Support Charges” and ensure that the Datasource is set to “AWS Cost & Usage Report” (as it should be by default).
3) In the Report Query Editor, first remove all existing text (including brackets), copy the query below, then hit Apply:
{
"sqlStatement": "SELECT timeInterval_Month AS Month, lineItem_ProductCode AS LineItem_ProductCode, lineItem_LineItemDescription AS LineItem_LineItemDescription, SUM(lineItem_UnblendedCost) AS Extended_Support_Cost FROM AWS_CUR WHERE LOWER(lineItem_LineItemDescription) LIKE LOWER('%extended support%') GROUP BY timeInterval_Month, lineItem_ProductCode, lineItem_LineItemDescription", "needBackLinkingForTags": true, "dataGranularity": "MONTHLY", "timeRange": { "last": 1 }, "limit": -1}4) While the above query is generic, it serves as a good starting point to make the report your own. If you have perspectives configured, choosing perspectives that will help make engineering conversations easier is critical. Loading the query will load report configurations automatically. You can add perspectives like Account Owner ID, Resource tags, Team identifiers, depending on what you have configured. You can also add filters for Business Units, Teams or Accounts, to make the scope of this data smaller.
5) The above steps will load line items that are associated with AWS Extended Support relevant to your use case. Use the “Chart preview” feature to visualize your data.
Creating awareness at your company
Once you have identified the financial impact and understand which resources are impacted, you’ll need to reach out to the application owners. The query above includes steps that will help you find the owners using perspectives that you have configured for your tenant.
Although cost can be the starting point of the conversation, it is important to call out the impact if this is not managed by the end of Extended Support. AWS will automatically migrate the version, which could break applications. The goal of these conversations should be to ensure the application teams have a plan for migrating, not that they immediately drop everything to make this change.
In addition to working with impacted application owners, it’s important to create awareness within all of engineering and architecture. Not only so that new applications are not launched using Extended Support versions, but also to make teams aware that this could happen in the future. These conversations will be much easier when engineering is already aware of the Extended Support model.
In addition to FlexReports demonstrated above, Tanzu CloudHealth offers a robust solution for AWS cost management and optimization, and is a dedicated FinOps tools for customers using any cloud. To learn more, please visit our website or take the next step and get started with a free trial. We will also be onsite at FinOps X in San Diego from June 19-22 – if you are there please stop by our booth and say hello!
