# AWS Deadline Cloud now shows you exactly what your EBS volumes cost!

Hi everyone, it's Shii! Today I've got a small but genuinely useful cost-management update from AWS.

## What was announced?

This comes from AWS's official update feed, AWS What's New. AWS Deadline Cloud now shows the cost of Amazon EBS persistent volumes right in the Usage Explorer inside the Deadline Cloud Monitor app. AWS Deadline Cloud is a fully managed service that helps teams run compute-intensive workloads in the cloud for things like visual effects, animation, product design, simulation, and gaming.

## The story so far

Until now, Deadline Cloud let you see costs tied to compute and licenses. But after persistent EBS volumes were added, there was no way to see the storage costs that came with them. Since these volumes can now stick around independent of any job or session, it was hard to tell how much a given volume was actually costing you.

## What changes

With this update, Deadline Cloud tracks the cost of each EBS volume from the moment it's created until it's deleted. That includes volumes sitting idle with no job or session attached. This shows up as a new "persistent volume" usage type in both the Usage Explorer and the statistics APIs. Costs are attributed to the fleet that owns the volume, so you can roll them up by fleet, by farm, or by time period. That should make it much easier to spot volumes that have been left running unnecessarily, and to decide whether to adjust their time-to-live or just let them expire.

## Dive Deep

According to the announcement, here's what you should know:

- Cost tracking is enabled automatically — there's nothing you need to configure
- There's no additional charge for this at all
- It's available in every AWS Region where Deadline Cloud is offered

Under the hood, it looks like Deadline Cloud follows each EBS volume's full lifecycle, from creation to deletion, and calculates cost across that whole span. Because it tracks volumes regardless of whether a job or session is attached, it can surface the cost of volumes that are just sitting there unused, which is really the whole point.

## Wrap-up

- AWS Deadline Cloud now lets you see persistent EBS volume costs in both the Usage Explorer and the statistics APIs
- Costs are attributed to the owning fleet, so you can view them by fleet, farm, or time period
- No setup and no extra cost — it's on automatically everywhere Deadline Cloud is available
- It makes forgotten, idle volumes easier to spot, which helps with cost optimization like tuning your TTL settings

If your team runs rendering workloads on Deadline Cloud for VFX or animation, this is a quiet but welcome update.