New AWS Budgets features include API access, usage-based budgets, and more!

Starting today, you can take greater control of your AWS costs and resource usage with the new and enhanced features in AWS Budgets. You can now create monthly, quarterly, or annual budgets for your AWS resource usage (e.g., EC2 instance hours) or your AWS costs. In addition to accessing Budgets via the Billing & Cost Management console, you can now use the new Budgets API or command line interface to create, edit, delete, and view up to 20,000 budgets per payer account.

Budgets can be set at an aggregate level (i.e. “total costs”) or can be further refined to include only cost or usage related to specific dimensions, or groups of dimensions. These dimensions include Service, Linked Account, Tags, Availability Zone, API Operation, and Purchase Option (i.e “Reserved”). You can also set notifications on your budgets to send an email or SNS topic message when the actual or forecasted cost/usage exceeds a threshold that you’ve defined.

For example, you could create a monthly budget titled “Monthly EC2 On-Demand Hours” in order to track on-demand EC2 instance hours by selecting the Purchase Option of “Non-Reserved”. You could then elect to receive an email notification – or a message published to an SNS topic – when your actual usage exceeds 80% of your budgeted usage as well as when your forecasted usage exceeds 100% of your budgeted usage.

All of your budgets – along with detailed data related to budget dimensions, time ranges, and variance analysis – are accessible via the Budgets dashboard and the Budgets API. You can also view budgets alongside associated cost and usage data within Cost Explorer.

To get started, navigate to your Budgets dashboard in your Billing & Cost Management console.

To learn more about AWS Budgets, please refer to the AWS Budgets User Guide.