This information has been copied to the AWS Cost Review Group homepage.

The AWS Cost Review Group (ACRG) works with development teams to approve and monitor the ongoing costs of the project's AWS resources. 

Responsibilities

• Approve requests for new AWS resources, and for extending existing resources, as defined in the AWS Environment Lifecycle.
• Project a total AWS budget annually at the start of the FY, reporting to CC.
  • Update an internal budget projection monthly.
• Report to CC if total costs change significantly, or after each flower release or by request.
• Review the Budgets, Budget Alerts and Cost Anomaly Detection annually.
• Review the Rightsizing Recommendations after each flower release.
• Review the user permissions in AWS after each flower release.

Background / Justification

• Historically there has been no oversight of AWS resources.  See for example the "Controlling AWS hosting costs" discussion at the 2023-03-01 Technical Council meeting:
  • Development teams have AWS admin rights.  There is no request process for spinning up new environments.
  • Cost monitoring has been done informally by Peter Murray, but he has no control over what the development teams are doing.
  • This approach was good in the project's early days, in order to keep development moving quickly.
• Community Council determines the community budget, but has never weighed in on specific AWS costs.
• The project determined that more oversight is needed now, but done in an agile manner.
  • There is concern that any approval process not unduly slow down the creation of new environments, so that dev teams' work is not impeded more than the minimally necessary. 
  • Waiting for council(s) to review & approve environment requests would be much too slow.
  • However, dev teams plan ahead in such a way that some oversight should be possible without impacting development.
• This group is meant to be able to respond quickly to AWS-related requests, while still maintaining a sufficient level of oversight.

Membership

Community Council and Technical Council are each asked to designate a representative, in addition to a Kitfox designee.

• Kitfox designee (AWS expertise and oversight)
• 1 Community Council designee (budget perspective)
• 1 Technical Council designee (technical oversight)

Product Council is also invited to participate as needed.  PC may want input in the (unlikely and extremely unfortunate) scenario that limited funds prevent the ACRG from approving all of the requests, in which case PC would have good input on prioritization.

It's up to the group whether they need to meet synchronously or just get things done via Slack.  However any discussions should be transparent (i.e. public channel, or recorded zooms).