AWS Budgets now Supports Variable Budget Targets for Cost and Usage Budgets

Starting today, you can specify variable budget targets for each month and/or quarter for up to one year in the future when creating or editing your budgets.

Using the new AWS Budgets planning features, you can easily create budgets which account for your projected growth or seasonal usage patterns. For example, as an online retailer, you could set a $3,000 monthly budget for your AWS costs which starts in February, but increases to $7,500 for November and December to account for holiday shopping before returning to $3,000 for January. You can also create a $10,000 quarterly budget which tracks your costs for your ‘Test Environment’ tag and automatically increases your budgeted amount by 10% each quarter for the coming year, in line with your forecasted growth. From there, you can then analyze the accuracy of your forecasts over time by measuring your actual spend against your projected spend for each budgeted period.

AWS Budgets gives you the ability to set budgets at an aggregate level (e.g., your total monthly costs) or at a granular level of detail (e.g., your costs tagged as ApplicationName: secretProject for a set of linked accounts) and receive alerts when you exceed (or are forecasted to exceed) your budgeted amount. Please note that all AWS Budgets functionality can be accessed programmatically via the AWS Budgets API.

To learn more about AWS Budgets planning capabilities, refer to the AWS Budgets webpage or the Managing your Costs with Budgets user guide. You can also proceed directly to the AWS Budgets dashboard.