AWS incurs costs for the services that it provides to its users. These charges are due to heavy computations and server costs for manipulating and managing data. These charges sometimes take the user by surprise when they learn that they have already exceeded their budget. However, there is a service introduced by AWS in which we can track, monitor, and manage our expenses with AWS.

This article introduces AWS Budgets and a step-by-step guide to implementing this service.

What is AWS Budget?

AWS Budgets can help us monitor and track the costs of AWS services currently running in the account. With AWS Budgets, users will be able to perform actions and utilize the resources within the prescribed limit of the cost.

Setting up a report with a fixed target amount will help us in tracking the resources and their charges. A graphical representation is also presented to the user for better insight and understanding. AWS Budgets updates its information on your account about 3 times a day.

How Do the AWS Budgets Work?

With AWS Budgets, the user will receive a notification on their email whenever their prescribed limit is about to be exceeded. This will help the user to terminate those resources that are running idle and incur charges.

Here are some steps in which we can implement this functionality:

Step 1: AWS Console

On the AWS Console, search for the “AWS Budgets” service. Click on the “AWS Budgets” option:

Step 2: Create a Budget

Click on the “Create a budget” button as seen in below screenshot:

Step 3: Budget Setup

On the Budget setup interface, select the “Customize (advanced)” option:

By keeping the rest of the settings as default, click on the “Next” button:

In the Details section, provide the name for your budget:

Step 4: Budget Specification

In the “Period” section, you can select the time period of the alerts. Keeping the rest of the settings as default, enter the price that should not be exceeded and upon which a user should be alerted:

Click on the “Next” button:

Step 5: Limit Threshold

On the next interface, click on the “Add an alert threshold” option to receive an email alert whenever you are close to reaching your budget. Here we have entered “85%” in the Threshold section which indicates that when the budget is close to 85%, it will send us an alert on the email entered in the “Email recipients” field:

Proceed to click on the “Next” button:

Click on the “Next” button on the interface:

By proceeding to the last step, we can review all the information about our budget setup. You can edit the information if provided incorrectly etc. Then, click on the “Create budget” button at the bottom of the interface:

Here, the budget has been successfully created:

By selecting the budget, a pop-up window will appear on the right side presenting a graphical representation of the budget:

That is all from this guide.

Conclusion

To implement AWS Budgets for cost monitoring, access the service from the AWS console and provide details e.g., budget limit, threshold, etc., and click on the “Create budget” button. AWS Budgets will alert the user whenever the limit is about to be exceeded so that we can terminate our instances and resources to optimize cost. This article has provided comprehensive guidelines about “AWS Budgets”.