AWS Billing Services
AWS Tutorial: AWS Billing Services
Welcome to the Billing Services lesson. How do you actually track what you are spending? AWS provides robust dashboards to monitor and forecast your cloud budget.
Why Learn AWS Billing Services?
As a cloud architect, your boss will frequently ask: "Why did our AWS bill jump 20% last month?" You need to know which tool to use to generate financial reports and track down expensive resources.
Tutorial Overview
In this tutorial, you will learn the primary billing tools:
- AWS Pricing Calculator
- AWS Cost Explorer
- AWS Budgets
The Billing Toolkit
- AWS Pricing Calculator: Used before you build anything. It is a web-based planning tool that allows you to input your expected architecture (e.g., 5 EC2 instances, 100GB of S3 storage) and generates a highly accurate monthly cost estimate.
- AWS Cost Explorer: Used after you have built resources. It is a visual dashboard that allows you to view and analyze your costs and usage. You can filter by service, region, or tags to identify exactly which team or project is costing the most money. It also provides forecasting based on your past usage.
- AWS Budgets: Allows you to set custom spending limits. If your costs (or forecasted costs) exceed the budget you defined, AWS Budgets will automatically send you an alert via email or SNS.
Exercise
?Which tool should you use to receive an automated email alert if your monthly AWS spending exceeds $500?