Avoid a Big Bill by using AWS Budgets

Introduction

AWS budgets alert you when your balance exceeds a certain amount.

AWS Budgets allows you to set custom budgets to track your cost and usage from the simplest to the most complex use cases. With AWS Budgets, you can choose to be alerted by email or SNS notification when actual or forecasted cost and usage exceed your budget threshold.

However, it does not prevent you from going over budget. It is not going to shutdown or delete resources. It is just going to warn you and you have to take actions.

In this post, we will see how to use AWS Budget to get notification when balance exceeds a certain amount.

Update Billing Preferences

To start with, first go to Billing Management Console and under Billing Preferences enable Receive Billing Alerts as shown below and click Save preferences.

Next, we will create an AWS Budget.

Create an AWS Budget

Visit AWS Budget Management Console and Click Create Budget button. It will start by asking to Choose budget type:

here, we are selecting a cost budget and click Next to setup budget:

Set your budget

Here are some basic values for a simple budget setup, you can adjust as per your requirements:

We can also specify a name for this budget and click Next.

Add Alert thresholds

On this screen, we can add alert thresholds:

We can add alert threshold as follows:

So, here we setup alert threshold for 50% of budgeted amount and also specified the email where billing alerts will be sent (we can also configure SNS Alerts as well if needed).

Click Next to review the budget settings and click Create Budget Button. Our monthly budget is created and shown in the budgets table:

Now, when billing amount exceeds the threshold, user will be notified by an email.

Summary

AWS Budgets allows you to stay informed of your cost and usage based on the custom budget limits. In this post, we learned how to setup AWS Budget to avoid big bill surprises.

We followed a simple setup, however AWS budget can allow for many other configurations. You can find more details on the official website.

Let me know if you have some comments or questions. Till next time, Happy Coding.