AWS Budgets
AWS Budgets allows you to set custom budgets to track your costs and usage, and respond quickly to alerts if you exceed your thresholds. It is the primary tool for cost control and alerting.
Key Features
- Types of Budgets:
- Cost Budget: Track costs against a specified dollar amount (e.g., "Notify me if I spend more than $100").
- Usage Budget: Track usage against a specified limit (e.g., "Notify me if I use more than 1000 hours of EC2").
- Reservation/Savings Plan Budget: Track utilization and coverage of your reserved instances or savings plans (e.g. "Notify me if my utilization drops below 80%").
- Alerting: Sends notifications via Email, SNS (Simple Notification Service), or AWS Chatbot when actual or forecasted costs exceed the threshold.
- Actions: Can be configured to perform actions (like stopping an instance) when a budget is exceeded (requires permission setup).
Exam Tips
[!IMPORTANT] Proactive Alerting: If a question asks how to be notified when spending exceeds a certain limit, the answer is AWS Budgets.
[!TIP] Free Tier Usage: You can use AWS Budgets to track your Free Tier usage to ensure you don't accidentally exceed the free limits.
Common Use Cases
- Safety Net: Setting a Budget of $10 for a student account to prevent accidental overspending.
- Project Controls: Alerting a project manager when their project burns through 80% of its monthly allocation.