What is the AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR)?
The AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR) is AWS's most detailed billing export, listing cost and usage line by line for every product and usage type.
Why it matters
The CUR is delivered to an Amazon S3 bucket you own and breaks costs down by the hour, day or month, by product or resource, and by your own tags. Each line covers a unique combination of AWS product, usage type and operation. AWS updates it at least once a day, and each update holds the month to date. The current version, CUR 2.0, is created through AWS Data Exports.
Because the CUR records the service, region, usage period and quantity of every line, it is the starting point for granular cloud carbon measurement. Carbon can then be tied to the same resources, accounts and tags as cost.
An example
Greenpixie's AWS guide sets up a CUR 2.0 export from the management account, so one export covers every member account. It uses hourly granularity, includes resource IDs and keeps the full set of columns. Cost allocation tag columns can be added so results can be attributed to teams and applications.
How Greenpixie measures it
Greenpixie's CUR enrichment reads the export from storage in your own environment and writes it back with added columns. Every original row and column is kept:
- electricity, including data centre overhead, in kWh
- usage emissions and embodied emissions, in tonnes CO2e
- total combined emissions
- water used for cooling and for electricity generation, in litres
No cost or spend data goes into the calculation. Enrichment runs daily on the month to date, and Azure and Google Cloud billing exports work the same way.