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Cost Visibility: Budgets, Cost Explorer and Tags

See where the money goes, and get a warning before the bill surprises you.

1 min read

  • AWS Budgets
  • AWS Cost Explorer
  • Cost Anomaly Detection

Three habits keep an AWS bill under control.

  1. Tag everything. Use consistent keys such as Project, Env and Owner. Then activate them as cost allocation tags in the Billing console so reports can group by them.
  2. Use Cost Explorer to group spend by service, region and tag. The usual leaders are EC2, EBS volumes and snapshots, NAT gateway data, and idle load balancers.
  3. Set a Budget with alerts at 80 percent actual and 100 percent forecasted:
aws budgets create-budget --account-id 111122223333 \
  --budget file://budget.json \
  --notifications-with-subscribers file://notify.json

AWS also offers Cost Anomaly Detection, generally available since December 2020, which flags unusual spend automatically.

Quick savings: stop development instances overnight, delete unattached EBS volumes and old snapshots, release unused Elastic IPs, move volumes from gp2 to gp3, and move steady workloads to Savings Plans after you know the baseline.