Set up your AWS Budgets like the Professionals
The cost of running your applications and services on AWS can quickly spiral out of control if you are not careful. One of the most important things you can do to prevent this is to utilize the AWS Budgets service. If you do it like the professionals, it will improve planning, and cost control, meanwhile providing forecasts and helping you take action if costs get out of hand.
Setting up budgets in AWS
Setting up budgets in AWS is very simple — you can create a budget from the AWS Billing and Cost Management dashboard. To create a budget, you must specify the amount you want to spend, the time period (such as monthly), and what you want to monitor. For example, you can set up a budget for a specific service, usage types or usage type groups, savings plans, reservations, or the overall cost.
Whenever you are on the AWS free tier, spinning up instances, launching databases, and setting up load balancers, you want to ensure you don’t exceed the free tier. Therefore, creating a budget notifying you once you have accumulated an actual cost of $0.01 could be a great way to help you terminate that risk.
Keep development costs in check
If you are part of or helping an organization with many developers working on different accounts, you might need help keeping track of all the resources being used. This can lead to a situation where some resources are no longer required but are still being charged for, resulting in unnecessary costs. To avoid this, you can set up AWS budgets for each dev account.
Once the budget is set, you can also set up an alert to notify the team leader or person in charge of that account when the budget is getting close to being exceeded. This helps the team to be aware of their spending and take action if needed.
By delegating the responsibility of cleaning up resources to each team with knowledge of their usage, you can avoid the need for a dedicated team to handle this task for the whole organization. This helps in reducing costs and streamlining the DevOps process.
The 80% rule
If you exceed your budget, you can specify what action you want AWS to take, such as sending you an email alert or denying new instances from running. By setting up alerts to notify you when you have spent a certain percentage of your budget, such as 80%, you will receive early warnings of rising costs. This will give you time to take action to prevent overspending. Taking care of minor issues before they become full-scale problems is incredibly important.
With Cost Allocation Tags, you can also use the AWS Budgets service to set budget alerts for specific tags to notify you if costs exceed a certain threshold.
Master your finances with Forecasts
To make informed decisions on AWS infrastructure, you should monitor the forecasting provided by AWS and get insights into expected usage and costs. You can set it up as an alarm metric for forecasted costs (just as for actual costs) to receive notifications well in advance if changes to the infrastructure are at risk of exceeding your budget. With forecasting, you can plan for future growth and investment in AWS resources, allowing you to make strategic decisions about expanding your infrastructure, scaling down, or introducing new services.
However, it’s essential to be aware that the forecasts may not always be accurate and that you can’t interfere with how the forecast is done; only specify for what resources you want to be forecasted.
Wrap-up
Setting up AWS Budgets is crucial to prevent unexpected costs and gain control over your AWS spending. Creating budgets is easy and allows you to monitor and control costs, set up alerts, and utilize forecasting tools. By following AWS Specialist best practices, you can optimize usage, manage costs effectively, and make informed decisions about your AWS infrastructure.
