Keeping your AWS budget under control

If you use AWS for your private website, tools or just for testing new things, you will get to the point where you’re not sure how much money your resources cost you. AWS has a small tool for that: AWS Budgets. With this tool you can keep your AWS budget under control and get notified if it exceeds your limit. Combined with proper environment management for your CloudFormation stacks, you can effectively control costs across multiple environments.

Features

The following main features are supported by AWS Budgets:

• Filter costs on tags, services, etc.
• Observe real costs or forecasted costs
• Get notifications if your resources exceed your limit

How to setup AWS Budgets

Go to your Billings Dashboard, click left on Budgets and then create a new budget. You will see a wizard that guides you through the steps.

Step 1: Setup a cost budget

Step 2.1: Give it a name and select period

Step 2.2: Specify your budget amount

Step 3: Define the threshold and notification settings.

Notifications are really helpful if you’re not constantly visiting your billing dashboard. Hint: use a forecasted value for your threshold, so you’ll get a message (hopefully) early enough before it’s too late. For more proactive cost reduction, consider automatically shutting down expensive CloudFormation stack resources overnight when they’re not needed.

That’s it already! This small feature can save you real money in case you forget to shutdown instances the next time. For even more cost savings, automate the shutdown of your development resources during off-hours.