Billing

Edge tracks costs for any activity that occurs on the cloud provider account where it is deployed. This includes internal costs from usage on Edge and external costs from applications deployed to the account. The costs can be aggregated by organization and service type, and a server admin can download a report of these costs.

How billing data is collected

Costs are determined on a daily basis. Edge collects costs by analyzing data from the AWS account that hosts a deployment. All costs that appear in the account are represented in Edge. Costs that are reported by AWS during the month they have occurred may be estimated. These costs are automatically updated. After the start of the next month, Edge will automatically determine if AWS has finalized the costs. At this point, the cost will undergo a final computation and then be finalized in Edge. Finalized costs cannot be overwritten, even if the unit price for the cost in the Edge billing configuration is changed.

How Edge billing is configured

The billing configuration for Edge is provided during deployment. This configuration includes pricing information for determining reported costs. An updated billing configuration will only impact costs that are still estimated. Finalized costs will not be impacted by updated billing configuration, such as unit price changes.

Billing mode

There are two billing modes for Edge, which determine how costs are computed and which costs are visible to org admins.

Unit Pricing mode determines costs by multiplying a resource's usage by its unit price. Components that are not known to Edge do not have a default unit price. The computed cost of these components will be equal to the raw cost reported by AWS, and are only visible to the server admin.

Raw Cost mode translates the raw cost reported by AWS to the computed cost attributed on Edge. All costs are visible to org admins.

Components

Components are cloud usage types that can be assigned a unit price and category in Edge. Each component belongs to exactly one service. If costs are attributed to usage types that do not exist in the billing configuration, their raw costs are used for their computed cost and they are categorized as unallocated.

Services

Services are configurable groups of components. Services may be flagged as mandatory, and are always enabled for usage. Services may be associated with an instance type. If an unapproved service is associated with an instance type, members of an organization will be unable to launch that instance type from within Edge. This does not prevent usage of the instance type or associated components in external applications deployed to the same account where Edge is hosted.

How costs are tracked

Costs are tracked using AWS Cost Allocation Tags. Specifically, the EdgeBilling$ tag is used to track costs and attribute them to organizations. The cost allocation tag is EdgeBilling$<edge-deployment>:<organization>:<classification>. Edge automatically tags cloud usage generated by activity on Edge (such as application launches or file storage.) When deploying applications to the cloud account that hosts Edge, resource tagged with this format can have their usage tracked the same way that Edge tracks its internal resource usage.

edge-deployment

This is the name of your Edge deployment. Any cloud resource that is tagged with the name of your Edge deployment can have its resources attributed to organizations within the Edge deployment. If a resource is tagged with a different Edge deployment or if it is untagged, it will be treated as an _unknown cost.

organization

The organization component of a tag allows cloud usage to be attributed to a specific organization. Edge automatically tags cloud usage from activity on Edge with the organization that generated the cost. Any external applications must specify an organization in the tag. Validation is not performed for external applications.

classification

Classification indicates the source of the resource usage. Usage by activity on Edge such as instance usage uses the internal classification. Applications that are external to Edge should use the external classification.

tip

If the cost allocation tag EdgeBilling$edge:myorganization:external is applied to resources used by an external application deployed to the same account that hosts Edge, then those costs will be identified on the edge deployment as being attributed to myorganization, and classified as external usage.

Viewing costs

The "Billing" section of the server admin dashboard allows you to view costs for Edge, as well as download cost reports:

The graph view has several options for controlling how costs are represented.

Dates

In addition to showing which days are included for displayed costs, you may set the granularity of the view to "Weeks" and "Months". The costs for those time periods will be aggregated.

Grouping and filtering

There are several ways that costs can be grouped for display. Additionally, filters can be applied to isolate what costs are included in graph generation.

Organization

The default view is to show costs grouped by organizations. In this view, you will see each organization's costs. There are two virtual organizations that may be visible in this view. _overhead is an organization that represents costs associated with running the Edge system. _unknown is an organization that represents costs that may be generated by cloud usage from other applications deployed to the account that hosts your Edge deployment. All organizations, regardless of whether or not they have been deleted, will be represented in this view as long as there are costs being generated for the organization.

Classification

Costs can have a classification. internal cost is generated by activity on the Edge platform. external cost is generated by activity from external applications that have the correct cost allocation tag applied. Some costs may appear under the files classification, which include some residual overhead for activity related to file storage. (Most costs for actual Files on Edge storage is classified as internal.) Finally, if there are costs that are classified as untagged if no cost allocation tag is applied, or if the cost allocation tag does not match the name of the Edge deployment.

Category

Costs are categorized, for convenience. Some costs may appear as unallocated. These costs are from usage types that are unknown to Edge. This can occur when an external application uses a new cloud resource that has not been catalogued by Edge. Contact Edge product support to update your Edge deployment so that these costs can be categorized.

Usage Type

Costs can be attributed to usage types. This is the most granular grouping of individual costs. Usage types correspond to cloud resources in the AWS account where Edge is hosted. They are grouped as components in services.

Service

Services are groups of components that can be approved for usage by an organization. Each known component has membership in exactly one service. If a component is not known to the Edge deployment, its costs are grouped in a special unallocated service.

Refreshing billing data

A server admin can trigger refresh of billing data for a given range of dates. The refresh may take several minutes to complete, during which usage data is retrieved from AWS and then billing is recomputed if the data that Edge has already computed has not yet been finalized.

Reporting data

A server admin can generate a cost report for the entire Edge system. The report will aggregate costs on a monthly basis, reporting one line of data for each combination of billing date, organization, classification and component. This report includes data not visible to organization admins, including raw costs and unallocated costs.