Amazon Web Services — AWS

Once you have submitted a request to link your existing AWS account to the University Enterprise agreement, CUIT will work with Amazon to have your account migrated to our Enterprise Agreement and charged back to the chart string that you provide in your request. You will continue to access and use your AWS services as you normally do. Only the billing for your account will change.

Yes, you can change the chartstring you use for this service at any time by sending a service request to the CUIT billing department.

CUIT will not split charges for one AWS account across multiple chartstrings. However, there are two options available to allow you to  split your AWS charges:

• Create ARC journal entries to split your charges across multiple projects as needed. AWS provides powerful cost allocation tags to help you track the cost for the individual AWS services usage, which you can then use for your own billing allocation and reconciliation.
• Optionally, you can create separate AWS accounts for each chartstring and allocate your AWS usage to each account accordingly.

CUIT will only bill you a single total each month, based on the billing details that AWS provides us based on your usage. As the AWS Account owner you have access to detailed billing information for your account at any time, by visiting the AWS Billing and Cost Management Console. From the dashboard you can see historical invoice details as well as current month-to-date spending, to help you keep track of and manage your account usage and associated costs.

Please note: AWS charges will appear as “Telecom” charges in ARC.

As described in the question about billing [link to the Where can I see the details behind my monthly bill? question], the AWS Billing and Cost Management Console provides historical invoice details, as well as current month-to-date spending specific to your AWS account. All AWS accounts linked to the University Enterprise Agreement have the following access to the AWS Billing and Cost Management Console:

See the AWS Billing and Cost Management documentation for details. While AWS does not provide a means to cut off service after reaching a threshold, you can set billing alerts with dollar thresholds which will trigger an email to you if those thresholds are exceeded. However, it is your responsibility to manage your account’s usage.

No. AWS allows only one Free Tier account for consolidated billing, so all linked accounts shared in the University’s single consolidated billing free tier for the 12 months beginning December 2015.

AWS shares pricing for unused reserved EC2 and RDS instances among all accounts in the consolidated billing family. The account that purchased the reserved instance gets first “dibs”. If however, there’s extra reserved capacity left over at the end of the month—that would otherwise be forfeited—this capacity is instead shared by any other linked accounts that match (in other words, is of the same server type in the same availability zone). You can read more about how this works.

No. Each AWS Account independently subscribes to a support plan level (or Basic Support at no charge).

The Enterprise Agreement negotiated between Columbia and AWS has several improvements of the “standard” AWS agreement. These include:

• Improved security, privacy and audit protections
• Branding and intellectual property protection for Columbia University
• Extended times to “exit” the service should Columbia and AWS decide to part ways
• Compliance with University Procurement and IT Security Policies

To get started, AWS provides online and in-person training. CUIT also coordinates training and information-sharing for the Columbia community through an AWS User Group for the University that meets periodically throughout the year. 

From a daily use perspective, the changes are not significant. We are linking these AWS accounts to Columbia’s master billing account, so the most notable difference is that your method of payment changes from a credit card to an ARC Chartstring. In an effort to keep the process simple, each customer’s AWS account (identifiable by its 12-digit account number) will be kept separate rather than attempting to merge multiple customer accounts together.

If you do not already have an AWS account, and would like an account to use for Columbia University business, simply submit an online request. Please note that, per University policy, you will need to provide a chartstring for all AWS account billing.

No. Student use is not covered for two reasons:

1. Billing is via ARC Chartstring only.
2. The University will not assume liability for student actions.

AWS Educate is a program that operates independently of the AWS Enterprise Agreement. It has its own contract and is designed for student and instructor use. AWS Educate provides grants in order to make the cost of learning to use AWS free. However, it currently requires account holders to provide a credit card to cover charges in excess of the grant amount. As such, Columbia University cannot recommend AWS Educate for our students as we cannot and will not require them to take on an unspecific debt risk. We have asked AWS to come up with an approach that would cut off usage in excess of the grant amount, but that capability does not currently exist.