Billing
How come my AWS bill contains charges for EC2 when I haven't used EC2 at all?
In most cases, the EC2 charge you are seeing is a result of the standard configuration we use in your VPC. The private subnets in your Cornell standard VPC are connected to the world (for outgoing traffic) by a NAT instance. That NAT instance is really a small EC2 instance, though it won't appear in your EC2 instance list in the AWS Console. You can see the NAT instance(s) configured for your account here: https://console.aws.amazon.com/vpc/home?region=us-east-1#NatGateways:sort=desc:createTime
The NAT instance gives EC2 instances in your private subnets access to the world for things like Linux repos, Windows update servers. We do have some AWS account owners that do not find the $1/day cost of the NAT to be worthwhile and turn it off. However, we caution about this because, with it off, your instances will not be able to do something as basic and critical as running "yum update" or "apt-get update" or get Windows updates.
Contact the Cloud Team if you'd rather not have the NAT deployed for that VPC.
See NAT Gateway pricing info here: https://aws.amazon.com/vpc/pricing/.
When will direct billing (though KFS) based on "Cost Center" tags be released?
This is still a work in progress and we expect to release this Cornell KFS feature in Spring 2017. In the meantime, you should strive to add "Cost Center" tags to your AWS resources as soon as possible. See Standard Tagging for details.
Until direct billing is turned on, you can use CloudCheckr or our billing API to sub-total the resource costs in your account (based on tag) and re-allocate those costs with the help of your unit Business Service Center.
Licensing
Does the Cornell Microsoft Agreement cover Microsoft software in AWS?
In most cases, no. See Microsoft Licensing within AWS.