AWS Budgets is a cost management tool that allows you to set custom budgets to track your AWS costs and usage. It helps you monitor your spending and receive alerts when your costs or usage exceed or are forecasted to exceed your defined thresholds.
Key Features of AWS Budgets:
1. **Budget Types*…AWS Budgets is a cost management tool that allows you to set custom budgets to track your AWS costs and usage. It helps you monitor your spending and receive alerts when your costs or usage exceed or are forecasted to exceed your defined thresholds.
Key Features of AWS Budgets:
1. **Budget Types**: You can create four types of budgets:
- Cost Budgets: Track your spending against a specified dollar amount
- Usage Budgets: Monitor usage of specific AWS services
- Reservation Budgets: Track utilization of Reserved Instances and Savings Plans
- Savings Plans Budgets: Monitor your Savings Plans coverage and utilization
2. **Alerts and Notifications**: AWS Budgets sends email or SNS notifications when your actual or forecasted costs exceed your budget thresholds. You can set multiple alert thresholds (e.g., 50%, 80%, 100%) to receive early warnings.
3. **Filtering Options**: You can filter budgets by various dimensions including:
- Service
- Linked accounts
- Tags
- Regions
- Instance types
4. **Budget Actions**: You can configure automated actions when thresholds are breached, such as applying IAM policies or stopping EC2 instances to control spending.
5. **Forecasting**: AWS Budgets uses historical data to forecast your end-of-month spending, helping you anticipate potential overages before they occur.
**Pricing**: The first two budgets per month are free. Additional budgets cost approximately $0.02 per day per budget.
**Benefits for Organizations**:
- Improved cost visibility and accountability
- Proactive cost management through early alerts
- Better financial planning and governance
- Prevention of unexpected charges
AWS Budgets integrates with AWS Cost Explorer for deeper analysis and is accessible through the AWS Billing Console, making it an essential tool for maintaining financial control over your cloud resources.
AWS Budgets - Complete Guide for AWS Cloud Practitioner Exam
What is AWS Budgets?
AWS Budgets is a cost management tool that allows you to set custom budgets to track your AWS costs and usage. It enables you to create alerts when your costs or usage exceed (or are forecasted to exceed) your defined budget thresholds.
Why is AWS Budgets Important?
Understanding AWS Budgets is crucial for several reasons:
• Cost Control: Helps organizations maintain financial discipline in the cloud • Proactive Management: Alerts you before costs become problematic • Planning: Enables better forecasting and resource allocation • Accountability: Helps teams stay within their allocated cloud spending limits • Governance: Supports organizational policies around cloud expenditure
How AWS Budgets Works
AWS Budgets operates through the following mechanisms:
1. Budget Types: • Cost Budgets: Track your spending against a defined dollar amount • Usage Budgets: Monitor usage of specific services (e.g., EC2 hours, S3 storage) • Reservation Budgets: Track Reserved Instance or Savings Plans utilization and coverage • Savings Plans Budgets: Monitor your Savings Plans utilization
2. Alert Thresholds: You can set multiple alert thresholds (e.g., 50%, 80%, 100%) to receive notifications as you approach your budget limit.
4. Budget Actions: AWS Budgets can automatically execute actions when thresholds are breached, such as applying IAM policies or stopping EC2 instances.
Key Features to Remember
• You can create up to 62 budgets per account for free (additional budgets cost $0.02/day each) • Budgets can be set for daily, monthly, quarterly, or annually periods • Supports filtering by services, linked accounts, tags, and more • Provides both actual and forecasted cost tracking • Integrates with AWS Cost Explorer for detailed analysis
Exam Tips: Answering Questions on AWS Budgets
Tip 1: When a question asks about setting spending limits and receiving alerts, AWS Budgets is typically the correct answer.
Tip 2: Distinguish between AWS Budgets and AWS Cost Explorer. Budgets is for setting thresholds and alerts, while Cost Explorer is for analyzing and visualizing past spending.
Tip 3: If a question mentions forecasted costs and proactive notifications, think AWS Budgets.
Tip 4: Remember that AWS Budgets can trigger automated actions - this is a key differentiator from simple monitoring tools.
Tip 5: Questions about Reserved Instance utilization tracking often point to AWS Budgets as the solution.
Tip 6: AWS Budgets is part of the AWS Billing and Cost Management console - know this relationship.
Tip 7: When exam questions describe scenarios where a company wants to prevent overspending or stay within financial limits, AWS Budgets is the go-to service.
Common Exam Scenarios
• A company wants to receive an email when spending reaches 80% of their monthly allocation → AWS Budgets • An organization needs to track EC2 usage hours against a predefined limit → AWS Budgets (Usage Budget) • A team wants automated responses when cost thresholds are exceeded → AWS Budgets with Budget Actions