Let's talk about cost. When you use AWS, you spin up resources only when you need them, and you pay only for what you use. Instead of having a fixed cost like you would have in a traditional on-premises environment, you instead incur a variable cost. This is fundamentally different than the way costs were managed on-premise, and therefore, has shifted the way that costs are understood, managed, and optimized. To optimize costs, you want to establish best practices for cost management, and use tools to monitor and analyze costs over time. AWS offers multiple cost management tools through the AWS Management Console. The AWS Cost Explorer is a service that helps you easily visualize and understand costs and usage. AWS Cost Explorer also allows you to create reports. There are default reports built in, or you can create your own and more granular reports to analyze cost drivers. Another tool AWS offers, is AWS Budgets. AWS Budgets allows you to create alerts when your costs or usage exceeds a threshold over a specific time period. You define the time period, whether it be a week, month, or year, and you also define your thresholds. When you exceed the threshold, a notification can be sent out. So, you can begin to look into where you can start to reduce costs, one tool that can help you identify places for cost savings is AWS Trusted Advisor. AWS Trusted Advisor not only helps you reduce cost, but it also can help you increase performance, increase security, and optimize your AWS environment. Trusted Advisor is a powerful tool to help you identify areas of improvement in your account. Let's take a look at the console and see what kinds of things Trusted Advisor can help you with. All right. So, we're at the console here, we're already logged in, and I'm going to go ahead and navigate to Trusted Advisor. All right, so, we've arrived at our Trusted Advisor dashboard. You can see we have a few different categories of things that Trusted Advisor can help you with. We have Cost Optimization, Performance, Security, Fault Tolerance, and your Service Limits. Right off the bat, I can see that this particular account can save $26.39 of potential monthly savings. So, if I click on the Cost Optimization category, I can get some more details. Scrolling down, I can see that I have some underutilized EC2 instances. What this means is that the daily CPU utilization was 10 percent or less, so if I open this some more, it will give me more details. It gives me a recommended action, which would be considered terminating or stopping those instances that have low utilization, or you can scale the number of instances down, or scale one particular instance size down as well to save money. If we keep scrolling down, we can see that we have two specific instances that are being underutilized, and we can see the estimated monthly savings for each instance. Similarly, if we continue to scroll down, we have another check against EBS volumes, and we have two underutilized EBS volumes here, and again it will show us the projected monthly savings if we unattach those volumes. All right, let's go back to the dashboard, and let's select another one. I'm going to jump into Fault Tolerance. So, now we're at the Fault Tolerance category, and you can see here that we have two warnings, for action recommended for our fault tolerance checks. What this is trying to tell us, if we expand, is that we have some EBS snapshots where the age of those snapshots, is more than 30 days old, or the EBS volume doesn't have a snapshot at all. So, that's not very fault-tolerant. We want to make sure that we're taking regular backups and snapshots of our EBS volumes. The next thing that we have here is Amazon EC2 Availability Zone balance. This is letting us know that we don't have an even spread across Availability Zones for EC2 instances, and we remember talking about fault tolerance and high availability, you want to use two Availability Zones for your EC2 instances. There's many tools that can help you manage your costs in the cloud. To get started, go to Trusted Advisor in your account and see exactly how you can start optimizing your environment.