Understanding split cost allocation data

You can use Cost and Usage Reports (AWS CUR) to track your Amazon ECS container costs. Using split cost allocation data, you can allocate your container costs to individual business units and teams, based on how your container workloads consume shared compute and memory resources. Split cost allocation data introduces cost and usage data for new container-level resources (that is, ECS tasks) to AWS CUR. Previously, AWS CUR only supported costs at the EC2 instance level. Split cost allocation data generates container-level costs by looking at each container’s EC2 instance resource consumption, and generates cost based on the amortized cost of the instance and the percentage of CPU and memory resources consumed by the containers that ran on the instance.

Split cost allocation data introduces new usage records and new cost metric columns for each containerized resource ID (that is, ECS task) in AWS CUR. For more information, see Split line item details.

When including split cost allocation data in AWS CUR, two new usage records are added for each ECS task per hour in order to reflect the CPU and memory costs. To estimate the number of new line items in AWS CUR per day, use the following formula:

(number of tasks * average task lifetime * 2) * 24

For example, if you have 1,000 tasks running each hour across a cluster of 10 EC2 instances and the lifetime for the task is less than 1 hour, then:

(1000 * 1 * 2) * 24 = 48,000 new usage records in AWS CUR

Note

When it comes to AWS cost allocation tags, you can use Amazon ECS-managed tags or user-added tags for your Cost and Usage Reports. These tags apply to all new split cost allocation data usage records. For more information, see Tagging your ECS resources for billing.