Budgeting on AWS

The principles of budgeting your cloud expenditure are not much different from budgeting in other financial contexts. When you budget, you normally identify a reasonable baseline. You cannot budget $5 for food in a month while budgeting $5,000 for entertainment. I suppose in extreme circumstances this may work, but not for most of us. The point is that you set a reasonable variable target and measure your actual costs to that target. You track performance over time and, as your needs change, you re-evaluate your budget to accommodate new situations.

You can use AWS Budgets to apply the same discipline to your cost and usage of AWS resources. AWS Budgets provides budgets for cost, usage, reserved instances, and Savings Plans. (We’ll learn about the mechanisms of reserved instances and Savings Plans in Part 2.) Setting up cost budgets helps you track costs and set targets so that you can see how well you are performing daily, monthly, quarterly, and annually...