How to manage cost with AWS Budgets

With AWS Budgets you can track and take necessary action on your AWS cost and usage. AWS Budgets can help you to monitor your aggregate utilization and can help you with your savings plans. AWS Budgets is very good in tracking a simple-to-complex cost and usage tracking, by helping you track all costs that are associated with your account and you can get alerted for actual and forecasted spends. This system can be configured to help you stay within the service quotas for a specific service, for instance, you can set up a custom IAM policy that denies any attempt to provision additional resources on your subscription. If you need a guide on how to deploy an Angular App on AWS please check this How to deploy an Angular App to AWS S3

Below are types of budgets you can create:
- Cost budget
- Usage budget
- Savings Plans budget
- Reservation budget

In this article we shall be covering the below topics:

1.         Creating a budget
2.         Viewing your budgets
3.         Editing a budget

Our first case study on budget creation will be cost budget

Creating a cost budget

Use these steps to create a cost budget

1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console https://console.aws.amazon.com/billing/. The Billing and Cost Management dashboard opens.
2. In the menus, choose Budgets.
3. On the open page, choose Create budget.

The following image is the landing page for creating a budget

4. Choose budget type, select Cost budget. Then, click Next.

5. In the Set budget amount, in the Period section drop-down select how frequently you want the budget to reset the actual and forecasted cost within the period.

Note: Daily budgets do not support enabling forecasted alerts, daily budget planning, or attaching actions.

6. In the Budget effective date, select Recurring budget for a budget that resets after the budget period while Expiring budget for a one-time budget that doesn’t reset after the budget period.

7. Select a start date or period to start tracking your budgeted amount. If you choose Expiring budget, select the end date or period for the budget to end.

8. If your budget period is Daily, Monthly, Quarterly, and Annually: in the Enter your budgeted amount box enter the total amount that you want to spend in each budget period.

9. Budget scoping – optional, for Filters it’s optional.

10. Under Details enter the Budget name which must be unique within your account. Click Next.

11. Click on Add an alert threshold.

12. Under the Set alert threshold, set the Threshold by entering the amount that must be reached for you to be notified. This amount can be an absolute or a percentage value. For example, let’s say your budget is $15,000. For you to be notified when the budget is reduced to $7,500 you will enter $7,500 as an absolute value and 50 for the percentage value.

Select Actual to create an alert for actual spend while Forecasted to create an alert for forecasted spend.

13. You can decide to set the Notification preferences which is optional. You can either select Amazon SNS Alerts or Amazon Chatbot Alerts.

14. Choose Next. But note that for you to proceed, you must configure at least one of the following:

• An email recipient for notifications
• An Amazon SNS topic for notifications
• A budget action

15. Review your budget settings and click Create budget.

Viewing your budgets

1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console https://console.aws.amazon.com/billing/. The Billing and Cost Management dashboard opens.
2. On the Menu choose Budgets.
3. Select the budget’s name from the list of budgets. The budget dashboard will open where you can check your cost variances for your budgets.

The image below is a dashboard where you can view vital info on your budget

An image of the monthly costs history

Editing a budget

1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console https://console.aws.amazon.com/billing/. The Billing and Cost Management dashboard opens.
2. On the Menu choose Budgets.
3. On the Budgets page pick your choice from the list of budgets and click Edit.

4. You can make any necessary changes to the budget but you cannot change the budget name.
5. After making your changes on each budget configuration page, click Next.
6. Click Save.

I hope you found this blog post helpful. If you have any questions, please let me know in the comment session.