4.2.3. AWS Budgets

💡 First Principle: AWS Budgets enables proactive cost control by allowing users to set custom spending thresholds and receive alerts when actual or forecasted costs exceed their defined limits.

AWS Budgets is a service that helps you manage your AWS costs and usage by allowing you to set custom budgets and receive alerts. It enables proactive cost control and helps prevent unexpected cost overruns.

Key Features of AWS Budgets:

• Customizable Budgets:
  • Cost Budgets: Set thresholds for total cost, or filtered by service, Region, tags, etc.
  • Usage Budgets: Track usage of specific service metrics (e.g., number of EC2 instance-hours, GB of S3 storage).
  • Reservation Utilization/Coverage Budgets: Monitor the efficiency of your Reserved Instances or Savings Plans.
• Alerts: Receive notifications (via email or Amazon SNS) when:
  • Actual costs/usage exceed your budget.
  • Forecasted costs/usage are predicted to exceed your budget.
• Proactive Control: Alerts you before you potentially exceed your budget, allowing time to take corrective action.
• Granular Scope: Apply budgets to individual accounts, specific services, tags, or even instance types.

Scenario: A company wants to ensure its monthly AWS spending for EC2 instances does not exceed $500. They also want to be alerted if their projected spending for the month is likely to go over this limit.

Reflection Question: How does AWS Budgets, by allowing businesses to set custom spending thresholds and receive alerts when actual or forecasted costs exceed these limits, fundamentally enable proactive cost control and help prevent unexpected cost overruns in the cloud?