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Pete: Hello, welcome to AWS Morning Brief. I am Pete Cheslock, and I am here yet again with Jesse DeRose.

Jesse: Hello. 

Pete: We here to talk about the best service announced not during AWS Storage Day 2020.

Jesse: So, close.

Pete: So, close, though. It was announced a few days after, and that is the AWS S3 Storage Lens service, which I think I've got that naming right. I know sometimes it's ‘AWS thing,’ sometimes it's ‘Amazon thing,’ and to be honest, I never know which is which. 

Jesse: Yeah.

Pete: AWS S3 Storage Lens is honestly one of the best new services that I've seen out, released thus far. I guess we're still pre-re:Invent announcements in a lot of this stuff. But what it is is a—from their site it says, “S3 Storage Lens delivers organization-wide visibility into object storage usage, activity trends,” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, marketing speak. Basically, it allows you to get a view of your S3 usage across accounts. Which, that's mindblowing, right?

Jesse: Yeah. This feature has so much potential; I'm really excited to see where they go with it.

Pete: Yeah. And so when I first saw this blog post on Amazon’s site talking about it, my mind just started going crazy because again, we work in Duckbill Group as cloud economists with a lot of different clients, and because Amazon organizations may be the reason why, made it very easy to spin up new accounts, maybe also the adage, the design principle of creating many Amazon accounts to kind of segment workloads or to provide you to—segment your workloads in a way for cost reasoning or security reasons. But all of those things—somewhat related, somewhat not—have caused a lot of our clients to have lots of Amazon accounts. I mean, you could see hundreds, in some cases, of Amazon accounts. 

And the issue that I've always kind of had, and especially an issue we deal with in helping our clients analyze their costs and optimize their costs is how do you aggregate S3 usage? Because S3 is normally in the top five of services that we see in usage, how do you pull that together? And I guess we do that a lot of different ways. Jesse, maybe you can chat a little bit about what are some of the ways that we try to analyze this spend currently?

Jesse: Yeah. Pete, I think I'm really excited about this feature because AWS already offers aggregate looks at metrics for other top services by spend. Like, for EC2, you've got Compute Optimizer. We don't have anything for RDS yet, but I feel like that might be not far off, given Compute Optimizer’s existence. And we already have other tools that allow you to look across multiple accounts to look at metrics, especially if you're looking at Cost Explorer, for example, you can see metrics across multiple accounts, you can see spend across multiple accounts. 

So, I feel like this makes sense. I'm really excited to see that you can look at all of your S3 storage metrics in one place because right now, the only way that we're able to get any kind of representation of S3 usage is throug