How to Setup Budget in AWS to Keep your Bill in Check
Dear Reader, I hope you are doing great. Today, I am here to show you, how you can set up a budget in AWS so that you can keep your account billing in check.
To be honest, AWS billing can be really confusing at times and not everything is free in the so-called “Free tier”. As a result, you might end up spending a few bucks while experimenting.
To ensure that, these few bucks stay within the limit and you don’t end up spending a fortune, I am here with this post.
Okay?
Alright, Let’s dive a bit deeper into why you should set up a budget in your AWS account.
Why Should You Setup Budget in AWS?
Well, Let me tell you a short story of days when I was a beginner in the AWS cloud.
I still remember the instance, when I started experimenting with AWS. Obviously, a virtual server or EC2 was one of the first services I played with. Then, I created an elastic IP, attached to my EC2 instance, did some experiments and terminated the instance.
All is well till now.
Suddenly, after a few days, I logged into my AWS account only to find out, I have been charged a few dollars for the unused elastic IP.
Had I known this earlier, I could have saved myself a few cups of coffees 😛
AWS Budget allows you to receive alerts as soon as your specified amount is spent in your account. You might want to set it up to a really low value such as $0.01 or so, to avoid being charged at all(You can’t set it to 0)
That’s why, I always recommend you to set up a budget while setting your free tier account.
Steps to Setup Budget in AWS
- Login to AWS Management Console
- Navigate to Billing Dashboard
- Create a Budget
Let’s get started.
1.Login to AWS Management Console
Login to your AWS account using AWS Management Console. You can either log in as a root user or an IAM user who has billing access.
Please note that, by default, an IAM user doesn’t have access to the Billing dashboard even if they are administrators. However, the account owner(Root) can give Billing Access to an IAM user.
Therefore, if you get an access denied message, log in using the root user to create the budget. Or even better provide your IAM user access to the billing console. Because it makes sense for you to know what you’ve spent while you are logged in as an IAM user to design a cost-effective solution
2.Navigate to Billing Dashboard
Once you are logged into your account, Click on your account name and then Click My Billing Dashboard as shown in the below screenshot.
You will be navigated to the billing console which looks something like below.
Click on Budgets from the left-hand side navigational menu and you should be navigated to the budget console
3. Create a Budget
Once you are in the Budget console, Click on Create a Budget as shown below
Choose Budget Type
We are creating this budget to monitor costs and receive alerts in case the threshold is breached. So choose budget type as Cost budget.
Click Next
Set budget amount
Once you click next, you are on a page where you need to put details such as:
- Period- monthly, quarterly etc.
- Budget effective date – recurring or expiring
- Start month
- Enter your budgeted amount ($)
- Budget name
I am providing 1 in the budget amount as I don’t want to spend more than 1 dollar. You can set this amount as per your need. It should be greater than 0 but can be as less as 0.01
Keep the scope to default as selected
Once you provide all the above info, click Next
On this page, cross-check the budget amount and click on Add an alert threshold as shown below.
While adding an alert, you can either configure the alert trigger to alert you on forecasted cost or actual cost. You can even create more than one alert threshold. For this tutorial, I am just selecting the actual cost as you can see below.
The final step is to provide your email address where you would like to receive the alerts.
Once provided, click Next
In attach action, we are not attaching any actions as of now As all we want is to receive an email alert when the threshold is breached.
Review the details in the review screen and click Create budget
And, there you go !!!
Your budget is created successfully.
Now, you can sleep peacefully. As soon as the threshold is breached, you are gonna receive an alert and you can take action as per that.
Conclusion
While doing hands-on experiments on your free tier AWS account is one of the best things that you can do to enhance your AWS knowledge. Keeping a check of bills is another important thing.
In this post, we learnt to set up a budget in an AWS account so that you don’t overspend. As soon as your set threshold is met, you will get an email notification so that you can take instant action.
I hope this post was useful to you. In case of any issue please add it in the comment section. I would love to resolve your issue.
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4 thoughts on “How to Setup Budget in AWS to Keep your Bill in Check”
Enjoy your articles, short and to the point; keep it up!
If possible, can you please take a look at this question and this question and give the answers in an article?
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/69243468/access-amazon-s3-from-a-java-program/69243684?noredirect=1#comment122407551_69243684