1. Manage AWS Budgets and Costs
In this video, we'll cover how to analyze AWS costs and manage budgets.
2. How to manage AWS costs
There are three steps to effective AWS cost management. First, you need to understand where the costs are being incurred. Second, set appropriate budget goals and set up notifications. Third, if a budget is exceeded, take appropriate action. Let's do a deep dive into cost analysis.
3. Cost explorer
The Cost Explorer lets users visualize, understand, and manage AWS cloud costs and usage over time.
Users have the option of viewing charges by day, broken down by services, account, or tags. In addition, users can also forecast their spend based on the recent spend patterns. Cost explorer is a free cost analysis tool but does not provide detailed item-level charges or help with budget. We'll discuss how to budget and get itemized charges next.
4. Budgets in action
AWS Budgets is a tool designed for monitoring and managing cloud spending. It allows users to set custom budgets, track costs and usage, and receive alerts to stay within financial limits. Budgets integrate with various AWS services for automated actions such as stopping a resource if appropriate.
5. Respond with actions
In addition to the built-in email notifications, AWS Budgets can be configured to send API notifications using a service called Simple Notifications Service, or SNS. AWS Lambda is a serverless computing service which can receive these notifications and respond to them. For example, using Lambda, you can prevent creation of new AWS resources.
6. Guidelines for budgets
The main challenge with AWS Budgets is not the tool itself but a user's approach to budgeting.
Simply using AWS Budgets doesn't guarantee financial control or optimal spending.
Budgets must be based on accurate, specific business needs to be effective.
Effective budgets consider all costs, are goal-oriented, and are driven by business purpose.
Without careful planning, AWS Budgets might lead to irrelevant alerts and ineffective spending limits.
7. Billing Conductor
AWS Billing Conductor helps you manage and organize your cloud costs. Imagine you're running different projects, teams, or users and you want to see how much each one is spending. Billing Conductor lets you split up the costs and assign them to different groups. Conductor helps get fine-grained costs so that you can bill your end users.
8. Reserved instance flexibility
AWS Reserved Instance Flexibility lets you save money on cloud services. When you buy a Reserved Instance, you commit to using specific cloud resources for a set time, usually at a lower price. Flexibility means you can change some details, like the size, without losing your discount.
Reserved Instance flexibility applies to any instance in its family which adds up to the purchased size. This addition is based on a normalization table.
For example, if you purchase two RIs for two m3.medium instances, these RIs savings also apply to an m3.large instance.
9. Let's practice!
Let's dive in and do some exercises!