Blended and Unblended in AWS CUR

There are hundreds of columns in the AWS Cost and Usage Report, and at least 10 on just cost/rates/prices alone. Which one do we use? To get started, let us focus on the numbers columns first.

Consolidated Billing

An organization can consolidate billing across all its AWS accounts into a single invoice and thus better leverage volume pricing tiers and RI discounts. I have seen clients having 100+ accounts under a single AWS Organization. Imagine there is no consolidated pricing, and how expensive it will be for each member account!

The master account pays for all the charges aggregated by the linked member accounts, but each member account also gets its own bill for showback or chargeback purposes.

The master account have blended rates:

• Blended Cost: combined cost across all member accounts
• Blended Rate: blended cost/usage quantity

The member accounts have unblended rates:

• Unblended Cost: average cost of the SKU x quantity used by the member account
• Unblended Rate: averaged out price per quantity of SKU

In our initial analysis for clients, as there are too many member accounts and it is not efficient to be too micro, we begin with analyzing the Cost and Usage Report for the master account to achieve the lower hanging fruits of RI and savings plan coverage, before we delve deeper into the architectural decisions and usage for each individual member accounts.

The portion on RI and Savings Plan columns is a huge topic by itself, and I will share more in a post next time, but if you need more information right now, you can refer to this post and this post first!