aws-cost-operations

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• SKILL.md

SKILL.md (first lines)

# AWS Cost & Operations

This skill provides comprehensive guidance for AWS cost optimization, monitoring, observability, and operational excellence with integrated MCP servers.

## AWS Documentation Requirement

Always verify AWS facts using MCP tools (`mcp__aws-mcp__*` or `mcp__*awsdocs*__*`) before answering. This catalog tree does not bundle MCP servers, setup dependencies or the references named below. Discover actual tools; if unavailable, use current official AWS documentation or report missing account data. Do not claim setup auto-loaded or install/connect a server without authorization.

## Integrated MCP Servers

The upstream plugin describes these 3 MCP servers; this skill alone does not provide them:

### Bundled Servers

#### 1. AWS Pricing MCP Server (`pricing`)
**Purpose**: Pre-deployment cost estimation and optimization
- Estimate costs before deploying resources
- Compare pricing across regions
- Calculate Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
- Evaluate different service options for cost efficiency

#### 2. AWS Cost Explorer MCP Server (`costexp`)
**Purpose**: Detailed cost analysis and reporting
- Analyze historical spending patterns
- Identify cost anomalies and trends
- Forecast future costs
- Analyze cost by service, region, or tag

#### 3. Amazon CloudWatch MCP Server (`cw`)
**Purpose**: Metrics, alarms, and logs analysis
- Query CloudWatch metrics and logs
- Create and manage CloudWatch alarms
- Troubleshoot operational issues
- Monitor resource utilization

> **Note**: The following servers are available separately via the Full AWS MCP Server (see `aws-mcp-setup` skill) and are not bundled with this plugin:
> - AWS Billing and Cost Management MCP — Real-time billing details
> - CloudWatch Application Signals MCP — APM and SLOs
> - AWS Managed Prometheus MCP — PromQL queries for containers
> - AWS CloudTrail MCP — API activity audit
> - AWS Well-Architected Security Assessment MCP — Security posture assessment

## When to Use This Skill

Use this skill when:
- Optimizing AWS costs and reducing spending
- Estimating costs before deployment
- Monitoring application and infrastructure performance
- Setting up observability and alerting
- Analyzing spending patterns and trends
- Investigating operational issues
- Auditing AWS activity and changes
- Assessing security posture
- Implementing operational excellence

## Cost Optimization Best Practices

Confirm payer/member account, region, currency, billing period and cost basis (unblended/amortized/net) before comparing totals. Billing data can lag; budgets/alerts are not hard spend caps. Cost Explorer/Logs Insights queries may themselves incur charges. Missing CloudTrail events do not prove no action occurred: check retention, region and event coverage. EC2 guest memory requires agent/custom metrics. Deletion, commitments, alarm actions and rightsizing require a scoped approved change and recovery analysis; do not remove backups solely because they look unused.

### Pre-Deployment Cost Estimation

**Always estimate costs before deploying**:
1. Use **AWS Pricing MCP** to estimate resource costs
2. Compare pricing across different regions
3. Evaluate alternative service options
4. Calculate expected monthly costs
5. Plan for scaling and growth

**Example workflow**:
```
"Estimate the monthly cost of running a Lambda function with
1 million invocations, 512MB memory, 3-second duration in us-east-1"
```

### Cost Analysis and Optimization

**Regular cost reviews**:
1. Use **Cost Explorer MCP** to analyze spending trends
2. Identify cost anomalies and unexpected charges
3. Review costs by service, region, and environment
4. Compare actual vs. budgeted costs
5. Generate cost optimization recommendations

**Cost optimization strategies**:
- Right-size over-provisioned resources
- Use appropriate storage classes (S3, EBS)
- Implement auto-scaling for dynamic workloads
- Leverage Savings Plans and Reserved Instances
- Delete unused resources and snapshots
- Use cost allocation tags effectively

### Budget Monitoring

**Track spending against budgets**:
1. Use **Billing and Cost Management MCP** to monitor budgets
2. Set up budget alerts for threshold breaches
3. Review budget utilization regularly
4. Adjust budgets based on trends
5. Implement cost controls and governance

## Monitoring and Observability Best Practices

### CloudWatch Metrics and Alarms

**Implement comprehensive monitoring**:
1. Use **CloudWatch MCP** to query metrics and logs
2. Set up alarms for critical metrics:
   - CPU and memory utilization
   - Error rates and latency
   - Queue depths and processing times
   - API gateway throttling
   - Lambda errors and timeouts
3. Create CloudWatch dashboards for visualization
4. Use log insights for troubleshooting

**Example alarm scenarios**:
- Lambda error rate > 1%
- EC2 CPU utilization > 80%
- API Gateway 4xx/5xx error spike

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