We have setup Tags on the slaves to allow us to track costs of spot instances in AWS.
The AWS cost explorer reports though doesn’t show them.
I can see the tags in AWS Billing Cost Explorer (under Billing Dashboard). I cannot though see any costs associated with these Tags as it looks like AWS doesn’t activate these be default.
I’ve tried accessing them using the API - AWSInsightsIndexService.GetTags but this doesn’t show them either.
Any ideas how I can track the Tags from a cost perspective in AWS for those slaves?
It might be obvious (or not), but have you activated the tags under AWS Console > Billing > Cost Allocation Tags?
You must explicitly activate any tags you want to use for cost allocation before they show up in the reports.
Thanks. I did look at this and see that the Tags were in activate. If I activate them I presume that they will only be active for future instances.
As these are spot instances it wouldn’t be possible to activate the Tags after the render has utilised the instance. So I am not sure how you can dynamically tag something and auto activate them in the same process. Unless you always use the same Tag. Our goal is to have a project tag for each render. As this can change per job it wouldn’t be possible to activate them prior to the job being run.
No, we currently only support a tag being assigned at instance start-up.
Tracking per-project is a difficult angle at the moment. I don’t think many AWS customers dynamically change tags over the lifetime of an instance, so it’s hard to find if the cost reporting handles this correctly. It’s entirely possible for you to leverage the boto library we ship with Deadline if you wanted to create an OnJobStarted event that would change tags on a running instance.
There are some gotchas with that approach, mainly that there are API limits that could throttle not only the tagging requests, but more mission critical endpoints in AWS. If you had a failing instance type for example, it may make an API request for every job which comes up.