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Watch Your AWS Spend: Configure Billing Alarms and Budgets

March 15, 2022

More and more businesses are using Amazon’s Web Services (AWS) for cost effective cloud services. AWS is very flexible, scales well and is quick to configure. Everything is billed on a metered basis, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. You pay for what you use. Sounds fair. However, sometimes you can’t really control the amount of AWS that are consumed. As an example, perhaps your website is hosted on AWS. You pay for bandwidth to support the number of users to your site. Your cost would increase quite a bit if all of a sudden the number of visitors tripled. There are some steps you can take to be notified when AWS hits a particular threshold. CloudSavvy IT has a post to help you set AWS billing alarms and budgets.

You will need to turn on Billing Alerts from the Billing Dashboard. You select Billing Preferences and Enable Billing Alerts. The heavy lifting is done using the CloudWatch Management Console. Once you select Create Alarm, you can set up an alert for pretty much any metric. Besides alerts, you may want to consider setting a budget for your AWS spend to help control how much you want to spend each month. Experiment with Budgets and Alarms to get better vision into your AWS dollars.

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