Getting Started with AnyCost

Follow these steps to create your AnyCost Adaptors and automate the flow of any cost data you want into the CloudZero platform.

Step 1: Create an S3 bucket to store data

Once your Adaptor is writing to the Common Bill Format correctly, it must write those files to an S3 bucket.

Step 1a: Create the S3 bucket

1. Create the bucket in your AWS account in the way you’re most comfortable. If needed, here is the AWS documentation around creating S3 buckets.

2. Once the bucket is created, inside the bucket create a folder that billing data will be deposited into. Name it whatever makes sense to you, but for the purpose of this document, we will refer to this S3 object (folder) you created as “prefix”. Note: formatting will look something like this: bucket/prefix

Please ensure that you put billing data into that S3 bucket under the prefix, either manually or by pointing the AnyCost billing adapter to that bucket and prefix.

Step 1b: Apply the appropriate policy to your CloudZero IAM role

1. Locate the role that CloudZero already uses to access other buckets in your system. If you used our automated account connection process, it will look something similar to the following: cloudzero-connected-account-live-ResourceOwner-Role-<RANDOM ID>

2. Apply the following additional policy to your role (this will not replace any policies - this is in addition to those already there). If necessary, the AWS documentation on attaching policies to roles can be found here.

Please Note: Replace <bucket_name> with the name of the bucket created in step 1a.

{
    "Action": [
        "s3:Get*",
        "s3:List*"
],
    "Resource": [
        "arn:aws:s3:::<bucket_name>",
        "arn:aws:s3:::<bucket_name>/*"
    ],
    "Effect": "Allow",
}

Once the role is created, make note of its ARN. You will need to send it to CloudZero in the step 3. If you forget to do this during creation, instructions on finding your role’s ARN can be found here.

Step 2: Create a Custom Adaptor

Automate the flow of any cost data you want into the CloudZero platform by creating a custom Adaptor. For more information on how to do this, see Creating AnyCost Custom Adaptors.

Step 3: Register the Connection in the UI

Now that you are writing your cost data to the S3 bucket, you will need to register that as a Billing Connection in the CloudZero UI.

For more information on how to do this, see Connecting Custom Data from AnyCost Adaptors.

Once the Billing Connection has been saved, it will kick-off a process to ingest any files it finds in that S3 bucket. Refresh the page periodically to check for any warnings or errors.