AWS Budgets Overview

AWS Budgets is a tool designed to help you manage your AWS spending and usage. It allows you to set budgets based on actual or estimated charges and sends alerts if your costs are expected to exceed your budget limits. Here's a concise breakdown of what AWS Budgets offers and how it works:

Key Features

• Budget Types: AWS Budgets supports four types of budgets:
  • Usage: Monitors how much you use AWS services.
  • Cost: Keeps track of your AWS spending.
  • Reservation: Helps manage Reserved Instance (RI) utilization and costs.
  • Savings Plan: Monitors your Savings Plans, similar to how it does with RIs.

Reservation and Savings Plans

• Reserved Instances: You can track the utilization of your Reserved Instances across various services, including EC2, ElastiCache, RDS, and Redshift. This feature is particularly useful for optimizing your RI investments.

Notifications and Alarms

• You can configure up to five notifications per budget to alert you when your spending or usage is close to or exceeds your budgeted amount.
• Granular Filtering: Budgets can be filtered by service, linked account, tags, purchase options, and more, offering flexibility and detailed tracking similar to AWS Cost Explorer.

Pricing

• The first two budgets you create are free.
• After that, each budget costs $0.02 per day.

Practical Use

AWS Budgets is a powerful tool for cost management and optimization, providing detailed insights and alerts to help you keep your AWS spending in check. It's particularly useful for organizations with complex spending patterns or those looking to maximize their use of Reserved Instances and Savings Plans. By leveraging the granular filtering options, you can achieve a detailed view of your costs and usage, enabling more informed decision-making and financial planning.

Example and Application

• Setting up an AWS Budget for an EC2 Reserved Instance to monitor its utilization and costs, ensuring you're maximizing your investment and not overspending.

Conclusion

AWS Budgets is an essential tool for anyone looking to manage their AWS spending more effectively. Its flexibility, detailed tracking capabilities, and alerting features make it a valuable asset for both small projects and large enterprises.