The course is part of this learning path
This course will explain how AWS Budgets can help you manage AWS spend and improve financial planning.
Learning Objectives
- What the tool is and the benefit it provides
- How to set up a Budget and configure Budgets actions
- How to send a Budget report
- And lastly, how to configure and use AWS Cost Anomaly Detection
Intended Audience
This course has been created for financial operations professionals interested in controlling AWS costs and for engineering team members who want more visibility into the cost of their environments.
Prerequisites
To get the most out of this course, you should have an understanding of the AWS Billing console and AWS Cost Explorer. Additionally, I briefly discuss establishing permissions through IAM and AWS Organizations and use examples referencing Amazon EC2.
Visibility into the performance of your budgets enables you to better plan and forecast for the future, and determine areas where the budget needs to increase or decrease. To get this visibility, you can use AWS Budget Reports.
Reports provide a high-level overview of the status of all your budgets and can help inform your decisions.
To create a budget report, you can login to the AWS console. Find the AWS Budgets service, and click on budget reports on the left-hand side. From here, you can click “create report” and then select the budgets you’d like to create a report for.
After that, you can select the frequency in which you’d like to receive these reports, whether that’s daily, weekly, or monthly. Keep in mind that each report costs $0.01. Then, you can specify the email addresses that you’d like to receive the reports. You can put up to 50 email addresses in this box but since I don’t know 50 people, I’ll just specify my own email address, alana.layton@cloudacademy.com.
Last, you can name your report and then click create report. Once you create this report, your reports will then be delivered to the email addresses you specified at the interval you selected.
Now let’s take a look at one of these emails and see what it looks like. This is an example of a report I created for two budgets in my account. The first budget called “CA Budget” tracks my daily spend. As you can see, I typically spend around $0.49 daily, and my current spend has exceeded that, at $.61. Additionally I have another budget called “EC2 Usage” that tracks my EC2 instance running hours. I budgeted 30 instance running hours, and currently I’m above that at 48 hours.
Now I know the status of each of my budgets. And it’s clear that I need to make some changes, as I have greatly exceeded my expected cost and usage. So, I’m off to go stop a few of my EC2 instances, which will reduce my running hours and my cost and hopefully my report will look better tomorrow.
See you next time!
Alana Layton is an experienced technical trainer, technical content developer, and cloud engineer living out of Seattle, Washington. Her career has included teaching about AWS all over the world, creating AWS content that is fun, and working in consulting. She currently holds six AWS certifications. Outside of Cloud Academy, you can find her testing her knowledge in bar trivia, reading, or training for a marathon.