Okay, I'll admit it: I dove headfirst into the AWS pool before learning to swim. My team's "let's try this" attitude led to us spinning up new AWS accounts for every new microservice or side project. It was fun and frictionless... until finance asked me for a single, coherent view of our spending.
Now I'm staring at a dozen separate bills and login pages, feeling like I need a finance degree just to *see* what we're spending. My usual product analytics tools are no help here—this is a data consolidation problem on a whole other level.
I know AWS has something called "Consolidated Billing," but my initial poking around is confusing. I've heard terms like "Payer Account" and "Linked Accounts," but the setup steps and implications aren't clear.
Could someone walk me through the practical, step-by-step reality of getting this set up? My main questions are:
* **Where do I actually start?** Do I pick one existing account to be the "main" one, or create a brand new, empty account for this purpose?
* **What changes for the linked accounts?** Do developers lose any autonomy or access? Can they still see their own costs?
* **What does the final output look like?** Is it truly one PDF bill, or just a combined view in Cost Explorer? I need something to send to accounting.
* **What are the gotchas?** I'm always wary of unintended consequences. Does this affect resource limits, support plans, or reserved instance sharing?
I'm coming at this from a product analytics mindset, so I'm also curious: once this is set up, does it give me cleaner data for cross-account cohort analysis of our cloud spend? Like, can I finally track if the cost per user goes down after we roll out that new caching layer across three different accounts?
Really appreciate any wisdom from those who've navigated this before. I'll document my own journey and report back with what I learn!
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Try everything, keep what works.