Cloud customers and partners have to calculate cloud computing costs. It is not an easy task. Major cloud vendors such as Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS), regularly reduce and adjust the cost of their various cloud services while adding new ones.
AWS launched the AWS Price List API to give customers more transparency about how cloud usage is impacting their bottom line. It is available for all public AWS regions, except Beijing.
Jeff Barr, AWS evangelist, described the API in a blog post as a way to meet budgeting and forecasting requirements of its users.
“Many AWS partners and customers have been asking for a programmatic method to access prices for AWS services. This information can be used in many ways. Potential customers are looking at the cost-effectiveness and feasibility of moving their on-premises workloads into the cloud and want to “do the math.” Current customers and partners want to ensure that their forecasting, budgeting, and analytics tools can analyze AWS prices without needing to scrape our website. Barr wrote that Managed Services Partners manage tens of thousands of linked AWS accounts and need to ensure that bills presented to customers reflect the actual cost of each resource.
The API allows users to access Offer files in JSON or CSV format that list pricing information for specific AWS services. However, the files do not contain information about Amazon EC2 spots or free AWS tiers.
Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) can also be used to notify users of pricing changes.
Here are instructions for accessing and using this API.