Barb Darrow reports that Amazon gives customers more detailed billing of their cloud services.    Indeed, the new AWS billing options allows customers see their cloud services charges broken out into more detail.   Think big cell phone bills that go on for pages that we never read.

From Amazon:

Dear AWS customer,

We are excited to announce Detailed Billing Reports, a new hourly grain view of your AWS usage and charges. This detailed report enables you to better understand your AWS Bill by providing hourly usage and cost data by product and Availability Zone. In addition, consolidated billing customers can now view unblended rates and cost. This report is particularly useful for analyzing your usage of Amazon EC2 On-demand and Reserved Instances.

Why do AWS customers need this?   Well, with some IaaS cloud service bills running well past tens of thousands of dollars a month, those in accounting are going to want to know what the charges are for specifically.   Also, there could be some need to allocate costs amongst divisions.

Moreover, those in IT want to understand where the resources are going as well.   Not as much around the direct costs, but how the use of cloud computing is living up to the promise of value.    I suspect that some of this detailed information will be dumped into a database and analyzed over time, either within AWS or locally within IT operations.

Some of these bill will be huge, so please don’t plan on printing them out.