New AWS Account? This AWS Service could save you money

AWS Budget Console

Have you just recently created an AWS account? Congratulations, you now have 12 months free to play around with the best cloud platform and services in the world! When I first created my aws account, I was scared of really trying out most of the services in-depth because I was afraid I would get a hefty bill at the end of the month.I had heard the horror stories of people running up hundreds or even thousandths of dollars on services they unknowingly started using but no longer used that were forgotten, until the monthly invoice came. So I always made sure I terminated any instance or services that I spun up as soon as I finished whatever tutorial I was doing before I logged off my console. Unfortunately, it is human to be forgetful. In my quest to have a hands on with most of the aws services, I unknowingly left a network load balancer running for about 2 weeks before I got an unexpected deduction an invoice from AWS 2 weeks later at the end of the month. I was determined not to experience this again, luckily AWS has one service you can use to manage and control your spending, AWS Budgets.

In simple terms, AWS Budgets does what its named after. It allows you to define and set a monthly Budget for your AWS account. It then monitors and tracks your usage for all the services you use, over a period you define and allows you to set a notification alert and be notified by email whenever your budget threshold has been reached. This helpful service will help you avoid unexpected costs. Here’s how to set it up:

1. Sign in to your aws console and on the search bar search for AWS budgets
2. Click on the create Budget option
3. Under the budget type option, select cost budget, then click on set your budget
4. Fill in the details appropriately. These includes: The budget name, period(Daily, Monthly, quartely or annualy), Budget effective dates, the budgeted amount for the period, then click on the configure alerts
5. Under the configure alerts section, configure the alert type i.e if you want to get an alert based on the actual costs or forecasted costs by aws
6. You can customize a threshold alert based on a certain percentage of your budget eg be notified when 80% of your budget has been reached
7. Add the email contact and set confirm your budget.
8. Review your settings in the review page and confirm by clicking on the Create Budget Page.

And thats it. AWS Budgets will now monitor your usage for you and notify you via the email you have specified if the threshold is reached. It also integrates with AWS Cost Explorer, that provides a more granular view of how the services that you have used are costing you.