AWS cost management tools wrangle unwieldy expenses

AWS has become the largest, most dominant public cloud provider in the world, thanks to relentless innovation of new services; secure, globally available infrastructure; and the flexibility to deploy resources and managed services at a moment's notice. Unfortunately, these services are not always cheap. Although AWS' consumption-based billing model has the potential to be efficient, it can also lead to tremendous waste. Except for a few new services, like Lambda, AWS doesn't charge for operational usage, but it does charge for resource consumption. The bill for an individual EC2 instance is the same whether it runs at 95% utilization or 5%.