Analysing AWS Cost with CUR & Redshift: A Quick Guide

Introduction

Managing cloud costs effectively is a key concern for organizations of all sizes, especially as they scale their usage of AWS services. With numerous resources and services contributing to your AWS bill, it becomes increasingly challenging to gain a clear and comprehensive view of your cloud expenditures. Integrating the AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR) with Amazon Redshift makes cloud cost analysis so much easier. It gives you a clear, organized view of all your cost and usage data in one place, ready to be analyzed and visualized. 

In this guide, we’ll walk you through the benefits of combining AWS CUR with Amazon Redshift and provide a step-by-step setup guide. 

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What is AWS Cost and Usage Report?

The AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR) is a comprehensive tool from AWS that enables organizations to analyze their cloud spending and usage patterns in detail. This report captures a wide array of data, including costs associated with different AWS services, resource usage, and pricing details, allowing users to gain valuable insights into their cloud expenses.

The CUR is typically delivered as a CSV file and can be customized to include specific fields relevant to your organization’s needs. It encompasses information such as resource IDs, pricing information, and usage quantities, helping you understand not only how much you are spending but also the factors contributing to those costs.

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What is Amazon Redshift?

Amazon Redshift is a fully managed data warehousing service provided by AWS that enables organizations to analyze vast amounts of data quickly and efficiently. Designed for performance and scalability, Redshift allows users to execute complex queries against petabytes of structured and semi-structured data, making it a powerful solution for data analytics and business intelligence.

One of the key features of Amazon Redshift is its columnar storage format, which organizes data by columns instead of rows. This format is particularly beneficial for analytical workloads, as it allows for better data compression and reduces the amount of data that needs to be scanned during queries. Additionally, Redshift employs advanced query optimization techniques and machine learning algorithms to enhance performance further, ensuring that users can derive insights from their data in real time.

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Why Integrate AWS Cost and Usage Report with Amazon Redshift?

Integrating AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR) with Amazon Redshift gives you a clearer, more detailed view of your AWS spending. It allows you to easily analyze and track your costs, uncover trends, and create custom reports that highlight potential savings. With Redshift’s powerful analytics, you can turn raw data into actionable insights, helping you stay in control of your cloud expenses. This integration offers several critical benefits:

1. Scalable Data Storage: Amazon Redshift’s scalable architecture is ideal for storing large volumes of cost and usage data, allowing businesses to maintain historical records for long-term analysis.
2. Data Visualization Integration: Integration with data visualization tools like Amazon QuickSight and third-party BI solutions allows users to create interactive dashboards, aiding in effective decision-making.
3. Advanced Data Insights: With Redshift, you can perform complex queries on your CUR data, uncover spending patterns, and get granular insights into where your cloud budget is going, helping you make informed cost-savin: g decisions.
4. Centralized Data for AnalysisCUR gathers all your AWS cost and usage data in one place, and Amazon Redshift helps you store and analyze this data efficiently. You get a single, organized source of truth for your cloud spending.
5. Optimized Cost Management: By analyzing your usage data, you can find opportunities to reduce waste, optimize resources, and lower your overall cloud costs. This proactive approach helps you make informed decisions on scaling, rightsizing instances, and leveraging savings plans or reserved instances for long-term cost reduction.

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Setting Up the AWS Cost and Usage Report with Amazon Redshift

To get started, head over to the AWS Billing Console and set up your CUR if you haven’t done so already. Ensure that your report configuration specifies Amazon Redshift as the integration target under the “Report data integration” section.

Step 1: Choosing Amazon Redshift for CUR Integration

When you choose Amazon Redshift as your integration, AWS will deliver the CUR files in CSV format, compressed with GZIP. Along with these CSV files, you will receive three additional files:

• Manifest.json: Contains metadata related to the CUR, which is not essential for our current tutorial.
• RedshiftCommands.sql: Provides useful SQL commands that help you create and load tables in Redshift using your CUR data.
• RedshiftManifest.json: A manifest file used by Redshift to determine which files should be loaded. For more information, refer to the AWS documentation.

After completing the setup, you should see all these files in your S3 bucket. Note that it may take up to 24 hours for AWS to deliver the first report.

Step 2: Setting Up Your Amazon Redshift Cluster

If you do not already have a Redshift cluster, you will need to create one. Follow these steps to set up a new cluster:

• Create a Redshift Cluster: In the Amazon Redshift Console, click on “Create Workgroup” and configure the following settings:
  • Cluster Identifier: Enter a name such as cur-redshift-cluster.

• Number of Nodes: Select the base capacity as 8 for this example.
• Network and Security: Configure the network and security settings.
• Namespace: Select your namespace
• Connect to Database: Connect to the Redshift database with your admin credentials and required IAM policies

• Review and Create: Review your settings and create your cluster.

Step 3: Loading Your CUR Data into Amazon Redshift

Now that your cluster is ready, you can load the CUR data from the S3 bucket into Redshift.

• Access Query Editor v2: In the Redshift console, click on the “Query data” button (orange) and then select “Query in query editor v2.” This interface allows you to interact directly with your cluster.
• Download and Use the RedshiftCommands.sql File: In another browser tab, open the S3 console and locate your CUR report. Look for the RedshiftCommands.sql file—this file contains several useful SQL commands that will help you create a table in Redshift and load the data from your CUR.
• Create a Table in Redshift: Open the RedshiftCommands.sql file and copy the first command (usually a CREATE statement). This command will create a new table in Redshift with the same columns as your CUR. Paste it into the query editor and run it. Once executed, the table will be created in Redshift.
• Load CUR Data into the Table: The next command in the RedshiftCommands.sql file is typically a COPY command, which loads data from the S3 bucket into the new table in Redshift. Before executing this command, replace the placeholders for <AWS_ROLE> and <S3_BUCKET_REGION> with your IAM role ARN and the region of your S3 bucket, respectively. Make sure to enclose the region value in quotes. Paste the command into the editor and run it to load the data.

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Best Practices for Optimizing CUR Integration with Redshift

To maximize the benefits of this integration, it’s crucial to follow best practices that ensure you are leveraging both tools to their full potential. Here are some best practices to consider:

1. Partition Data for Faster Queries

Partitioning your data is a powerful technique that can lead to significant performance gains when querying large datasets. By partitioning CUR data by date, you can improve the efficiency of cost analysis tasks. For example, if you regularly analyze monthly expenses, you can create partitions for each month. This way, when you run a query for a specific month, Redshift only processes the relevant partition rather than scanning the entire dataset, resulting in faster query execution times. Moreover, partitioning can help reduce the amount of data transferred during queries, further enhancing performance.

2. Use Compression for Cost Efficiency

Amazon Redshift’s support for columnar storage means you can leverage compression to optimize both storage costs and performance. By applying compression encoding to your CUR data tables, you can significantly reduce the amount of disk space used, which lowers your storage costs. Compression also enhances query performance by reducing the amount of data read from disk. Choose the right compression type based on your data types (e.g., LZO, Zstandard, or Delta) to ensure maximum efficiency. 

3. Automate CUR Data Loading

Keeping your data warehouse updated is crucial for making timely and informed decisions about cloud spending. By setting up an AWS Lambda function or a scheduled query in Redshift, you can automate the loading of new CUR files from Amazon S3 into Redshift. This automation minimizes manual intervention, ensuring that your data warehouse is always populated with the latest cost and usage data. This setup can be scheduled to run at off-peak hours to avoid performance issues during peak usage times, thus enhancing your overall data management strategy.

4. Create Materialized Views for Common Queries

Materialized views are an effective way to optimize query performance, especially for frequently executed queries that require intensive computation. If you regularly analyze data, such as monthly cost breakdowns or usage trends, creating a materialized view can cache the results of these computations. This means that when you run the same query again, Redshift retrieves the precomputed results from the materialized view instead of reprocessing the underlying data. As a result, your queries run much faster, significantly reducing the computational load on your database. Regularly refreshing materialized views can keep the cached data aligned with your current dataset, ensuring that you always have access to up-to-date insights.

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Economize: A Modern Approach to Cost Control

Integrating AWS CUR with Amazon Redshift has its advantages—it provides detailed cost and usage data, allowing you to create custom SQL queries to analyze your cloud spending. However, it also comes with several challenges:

• Complex Setup: Setting up AWS CUR and integrating it with Amazon Redshift requires expertise in configuring S3 buckets, IAM roles, and Redshift clusters. The setup process can take significant time and often requires ongoing maintenance.
• Manual Analysis: Once the data is loaded into Redshift, cost analysis requires SQL knowledge to extract meaningful insights. Users must write and run complex queries to get answers, which can be time-consuming and prone to errors.
• Delayed Insights: AWS CUR data is often delivered with a lag of up to 24 hours, meaning that users do not get real-time insights into their cloud spend. This delay can make it challenging to address cost spikes immediately.
• Lack of Automated Recommendations: AWS CUR with Redshift provides raw data, but it does not offer tailored recommendations to optimize cloud costs. Users must manually analyze the data to identify potential savings, which can be cumbersome.

Economize addresses these challenges with an automated, user-friendly platform that provides real-time insights, actionable recommendations, and a simplified integration process.

Why Choose Economize for Better Cloud Cost Control?

While integrating AWS CUR with Amazon Redshift can provide valuable insights into your cloud costs, it comes with significant complexity and requires manual effort to extract actionable information. On the other hand, Economize offers a complete, user-friendly solution for cloud cost management that saves time, provides real-time insights, and delivers tailored recommendations for optimizing your cloud spending.

Here are some key reasons why Economize provides better cost control compared to AWS CUR integration with Redshift:

1. Seamless and Quick Integration

Economize streamlines the process of integrating your cloud accounts, enabling completion in just a few minutes. Unlike the intricate setup of AWS CUR and Redshift configurations, Economize allows for rapid connections to your AWS accounts or GCP projects without requiring specialized technical skills.

The platform’s agentless setup eliminates the need for deploying additional software agents or making complex adjustments to your cloud infrastructure. This user-friendly approach ensures you can begin optimizing your cloud costs with minimal effort.

2. Continuous Cost Monitoring and Real-Time Alerts

Economize delivers real-time monitoring of your cloud costs, ensuring you remain consistently informed about your spending. The platform continuously examines your cloud environment for cost anomalies, enabling you to identify unexpected cost spikes before they escalate into significant issues.

By providing instant notifications based on customizable thresholds, Economize empowers you to take immediate action whenever your spending surpasses predefined limits. 

3. Automated Cost-Saving Recommendations

Unlike the manual analysis required with AWS CUR data in Redshift, Economize serves as your dedicated cost-saving advisor. The platform generates tailored recommendations to enhance your cloud spending efficiency, utilizing a sophisticated recommendations engine to uncover optimization opportunities that may otherwise go unnoticed.

4. Comprehensive Cost Analysis and Visualization

Economize offers a thorough and clear view of your cloud costs through detailed reports that facilitate in-depth exploration of your expenditures. The platform enables you to analyze specific spending areas interactively, providing breakdowns by services, resources, or labels to inform your cost optimization strategies.

With intuitive visualization tools, Economize transforms your cloud cost data into accessible charts and graphs. Unlike the cumbersome manual SQL queries necessary in Redshift, Economize presents ready-made visual dashboards that are straightforward and user-friendly.

5. Root Cause Analysis for Cost Spikes

Identifying the root causes of unexpected cost spikes is essential for effective financial control. Economize includes a root cause analysis feature that allows you to pinpoint the source of your cloud cost issues with a simple click.

Rather than manually sifting through data in Redshift, Economize automates this process, enabling you to quickly address the underlying issues and prevent future overspending.

6. Complete Visibility with Asset Inventory and Cost Breakdown

Economize provides comprehensive visibility into your cloud environment through an asset inventory that meticulously tracks every cloud resource. The platform also offers a detailed cost breakdown by services and resources, allowing for an accurate understanding of your financial allocations.

Features such as unit cost analysis and resource usage monitoring provide deeper insights into the specific costs associated with each resource, empowering you to make informed decisions regarding scaling and optimizing your cloud environment.

7. Always-On, Proactive Cost Optimization

One of Economize’s most significant advantages is its continuous, always-on monitoring of cloud costs. Unlike AWS CUR, which delivers data with inherent delays, Economize provides real-time estimates of potential savings, empowering you to take swift action.

With seamless integration, continuous monitoring, and automated recommendations, Economize provides better cost control than the traditional approach of integrating CUR with Redshift.

Conclusion

Integrating AWS Cost and Usage Report with Amazon Redshift empowers organizations to gain a comprehensive understanding of their AWS spending. With the ability to run complex queries, store historical data, and visualize costs in a structured manner, Redshift provides an effective platform for managing cloud expenditures.

However, Economize provides a more effective solution for cloud cost management. Unlike Redshift, which requires complex queries and manual effort to extract insights, Economize delivers automated, real-time analysis and actionable recommendations that make managing cloud costs simple and efficient. The platform’s ease of use, comprehensive visibility, and proactive cost optimization capabilities make it an ideal solution for any organization looking to manage their cloud costs effectively improving their overall financial performance.

Struggling with your Monthly Cloud Expenditure?

Managing your cloud costs doesn’t need to be overwhelming. At Economize, we help you reduce your cloud expenses by as much as 30%. Book a free demo today and take the first step toward better control of your cloud budget. See the impact on your spending immediately