AWS Budgets

AWS Budgets is an Amazon Web Services service that lets customers set custom budgets to track cost and usage, from the simplest to the most complex use cases.

AI Practitioner focus

• Create cost or usage budgets and alerts for AI/ML services to detect spend before or after thresholds are crossed; budget actions can apply selected automated responses.
• Budgets is proactive threshold management. AWS Cost Explorer analyzes historical/forecast cost patterns; neither service improves model quality.

Key points

• Can be used to set reservation utilization or coverage targets, alerting by email or Amazon SNS notification when a metric reaches its threshold.
• Users can set up five alerts per budget; the most important are:
  1. Alerts when current monthly costs exceed the budgeted amount.
  2. Alerts when current monthly costs exceed 80% of the budgeted amount.
  3. Alerts when forecasted monthly costs exceed the budgeted amount.
• Budgets can be created on a monthly, quarterly, or annual period for AWS resource usage or AWS costs.
• Reservation Alerts are provided for: Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, Amazon Redshift, Amazon ElastiCache, and Amazon OpenSearch Service (renamed from Amazon Elasticsearch Service in September 2021).
• Accessible from the AWS Management Console’s service links and from within the AWS Billing Console, as well as via the Budgets API or CLI.
• Up to 20,000 budgets per payer account can be created, edited, deleted, and viewed via the API/CLI.
• Six budget types are supported: Cost budgets, Usage budgets, RI utilization budgets, RI coverage budgets, Savings Plans utilization budgets, and Savings Plans coverage budgets.
• Distinct from AWS Cost Explorer (graphical visualization and forecasting) and AWS Cost and Usage Report (granular line-item billing export) — Budgets exists to send proactive alerts against thresholds, not to visualize or export detailed cost data.
• Budget actions let a budget automatically (or after manual approval) apply a control when a threshold is reached or forecast to be exceeded — options include applying a Deny IAM policy, applying a service control policy (SCP) across accounts, or stopping specific Amazon EC2 or Amazon RDS instances.

Pricing

• Standard budgets: the first two budgets per account are free each month; each additional budget costs roughly $0.02/day($0.62/month).
• Action-enabled budgets: the first two are free each month; each additional action-enabled budget costs $0.10/day.

Sources

• Managing costs with AWS Budgets
• Configuring budget actions
• AWS Budgets pricing