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AWS naming conventions: where confusion meets cloud costs!
AWS naming conventions: where confusion meets cloud costs!
Cyril avatar
Written by Cyril
Updated over a month ago

Let’s dive into AWS naming conventions, and be prepared for a challenging journey. For reasons that seemed valid back then, naming conventions can be quite tricky for certain resource types and are not consistent across AWS services.

Example Time:

When you create an EC2 instance, an EBS volume is created. Now, quick quiz: what is the service name for this EBS resource in AWS?

Well, there’s a good chance you might be mistaken, as the answer is “it depends.” If you check the CUR, you’ll see it listed as “Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud,” which is the same for EC2 instances. However, in Cost Explorer, it appears as “EC2-Other” (seriously?).

This is just ONE example; AWS is full of these quirks.

Tailwarden to the rescue

At Tailwarden, we’re here to help you—though it can get quite complicated, so we apologize for that. We decided not to rely on AWS’s naming conventions since they often don’t reflect what the resources are, preventing you from effectively monitoring your infrastructure.

We examined each resource and assigned the correct service name. For example, an EBS resource is called EBS! (daring, right?)

We did this for all AWS services, but this can make it tricky to compare costs in AWS Cost Explorer with what you see in Tailwarden (and don’t get me started on the CUR!).

To assist you, we’ve created a mapping table for clarity, which you’ll find below.

Note: In the Cost Reports page, we adhere to AWS naming conventions. However, in the Inventory and Custom Reports, we use our own naming conventions.

But what about services without resources?

When I first learned there were services with resources and services without resources, I was quite lost. Learning how AWS works is already quite damn tough, I don't need traps like this!

So, what are we referring to? Primarily one service: AWS Data Transfer. I won’t delve deeply into the CUR, as I might lose even more readers, but I genuinely don’t understand why it's a new service instead of just keeping a different charge type. I'm sure AWS has good reasons but it doesn't make things simple! BUT ANYWAY.

The challenge here is that these costs are spread across various AWS services, making it tough to find a comprehensive list (trust me, I tried).

Now, how does Tailwarden handle this? We chose to do things differently. AWS Data Transfer is a specific service that won’t appear in the inventory (since there are no resources), nor will it show in the Custom Reports by default. However, you can create a specific widget to filter these costs. When doing this, you can apply any other filters or groupings, allowing you to dive deep into those specific costs.

Tailwarden Service Name

AWS Service Name

API Gateway REST API Stage

Amazon API Gateway

Athena Workgroup

Amazon Athena

CloudFront Distribution

Amazon CloudFront

CloudWatch Log Group

AmazonCloudWatch

CodeBuild Project

CodeBuild

Directory Service

AWS Directory Service

DynamoDB Table

Amazon DynamoDB

EBS Volume

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

EC2

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

ECR Repository

Amazon EC2 Container Registry (ECR)

ECS

Amazon Elastic Container Service

EFS

Amazon Elastic File System

EKS Cluster

Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes

ELB

Elastic Load Balancing

Elastic IP

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

Elasticache Cluster

Amazon ElastiCache

ElasticSearch Domains

Amazon OpenSearch

FSX FileSystem

Amazon FSx

Firehose Delivery Stream

Amazon Kinesis Firehose

Glue Crawler

AWS Glue

Glue Job

AWS Glue

Hosted Zone

Amazon Route 53

IAM Role

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud

Internet Gateway

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud

KMS

AWS Key Management Service

Kinesis Stream

Amazon Kinesis

Lambda

AWS Lambda

MQ Broker

Amazon MQ

MSK

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka

Nat Gateway

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud

Network Insights Analysis

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud

Network Interface

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud

RDS Cluster

Amazon Relational Database Service

RDS Instance

Amazon Relational Database Service

RDS Snapshot

Amazon Relational Database Service

Redshift Cluster

Amazon Redshift

S3

Amazon Simple Storage Service

SNS Topic

Amazon Simple Notification Service

SQS

Amazon Simple Queue Service

SageMaker Apps

Amazon SageMaker

SageMaker Endpoints

Amazon SageMaker

SageMaker Pipeline

Amazon SageMaker

Secret Manager

AWS Secrets Manager

Security Group

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud

Snapshot

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

Transfer Server

AWS Transfer Family

Transit Gateway

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud

Transit Gateway Attachment

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud

VPC

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud

VPC Endpoint

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud

VPC Flow Log

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud

VPN Connection

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud

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