AWS Introduces Budgets – A Simple Way to Manage your AWS Costs

You can now simplify the task of managing costs on AWS with Budgets. Starting today, you can define a monthly budget for your AWS costs—whether at an aggregate cost level (i.e., “all costs”) or further refined to include only those costs relating to specific cost dimensions or groups of cost dimensions, including Linked Account, Service, Tag, Availability Zone (“AZ”), Purchase Option (e.g., Reserved), and/or API Operation.

Further, you can attach email notifications to these budgets that are triggered when your actual or forecasted costs exceed a threshold—that you define—relative to your budgeted costs. For example, you could create a monthly budget titled “Monthly Marketing Budget – EC2” and include within it only those costs relating to EC2 that you have tagged “Department:Marketing.” You could then elect to receive email notifications when your actual costs exceed 80% of your budgeted costs or when your forecasted costs exceed 100% of your budgeted costs. All of your budgets are available for viewing within the Budgets Dashboard—complete with detailed data (e.g., budget dimensions and time range) and variance analyses—and within Cost Explorer.

To get started, simply navigate to the Budgets link under the Billing and Cost Management dashboard.

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