Forecasting spending using ML-driven insights

An integral part of managing costs and spending is planning what your costs will be in the future. Thoughtful planning has the advantage of you getting ahead of yourself and making sure your AWS spending is within budget. We saw a bit of this in Chapter 4, Planning and Metrics Tracking, where we learned about budgeting and cost anomaly detection using AWS Budgets and AWS Cost Explorer, respectively. We’ll expand more into the forecasting side of things in this section.

Forecasting is the process of predicting or estimating your AWS spending based on past and present data. But it can also be based on new organizational initiatives and the workloads they entail to help launch a product or service for your enterprise. If you can plan your costs ahead of time and communicate these estimated but expected charges to the appropriate stakeholders, then you’re less likely to be surprised by a sudden spike in charges and questioned...