AWS Budget - How I Avoided an Unexpected AWS Cloud Bill with Budget Alerts!

Do you have an allocated budget for your cloud expense? If so, How you monitor that?

After two weeks of an extremely busy work schedule, I was catching up on my personal emails when I noticed a notification from the AWS Budget service informing me that I had exceeded my budget alert threshold. This prompted me to check my AWS account, where I quickly identified the services consuming my budget.

I had configured an LLM model and its associated invocation API for a prototype, but with my hectic schedule, I forgot to remove them. This oversight caused an unexpected spike in my cloud usage. The key lesson learned? Spending a few minutes configuring an AWS Budget Alert was a worthwhile investment. It helped me catch the issue before it could escalate further, preventing unplanned cloud expenses.

Here is a sample email notification I received!

Also, example of spike It caused in my cloud usages!

What is an AWS Budget Alert?

Remember that the AWS Cloud model follows a shared responsibility model. While AWS takes care of cloud infrastructure and security, customers are responsible for service usage and configurations. AWS provides various tools for cost monitoring, but it is up to the customer to ensure these tools and services are properly utilized.

AWS Budget Alert is one such service that helps users monitor their cloud spending. It can be configured to send notifications via email or an SNS topic when spending reaches predefined thresholds. These alerts can be set at various budget levels, such as 50%, 80%, or 100% of the allocated budget.

Unexpected costs can arise from multiple scenarios, including auto-scaling, sudden spikes in API calls, increased usage of S3 storage, and now, in the GenAI era, the storage of large LLM model files, which can significantly impact costs.

What is an AWS Budget Alert?

Remember that the AWS Cloud model follows a shared responsibility model. While AWS takes care of cloud infrastructure and security, customers are responsible for service usage and configurations. AWS provides various tools for cost monitoring, but it is up to the customer to ensure these tools and services are properly utilized.

AWS Budget Alert is one such service that helps users monitor their cloud spending. It can be configured to send notifications via email or an SNS topic when spending reaches predefined thresholds. These alerts can be set at various budget levels, such as 50%, 80%, or 100% of the allocated budget.

Unexpected costs can arise from multiple scenarios, including auto-scaling, sudden spikes in API calls, increased usage of S3 storage, and now, in the GenAI era, the storage of large LLM model files, which can significantly impact costs.

How to Set Up AWS Budget Alerts

AWS provides a simple way to setup the Budget alerts. Let's look at these steps:

• Log in to your AWS account and navigate to AWS Budgets in the Billing Dashboard.
• Click on Create a new budget and choose a budget type.
• Set up a budget based on your expected cloud usage.
• Specify the threshold percentage for alert notifications (e.g., 80% of the budget).

Here is an example of a budget configured in the AWS Billing Dashboard:

And an example of a budget alert configured for this budget:

If you’d like to take an extra step and receive budget alert notifications for an entire team or Slack channel, please refer to my previous article on configuring a Slack channel for AWS Budget notifications.

Conclusion

In my case, the AWS Budget alert acted as a safety net. Without it, I might have realized the issue only after receiving a higher than expected AWS bill. The budget alert gave me the opportunity to take immediate action by identifying and terminating unused resources, bringing my cloud costs under control.

My experience with the forgotten LLM model taught me that setting up proactive budget monitoring is not just a good practice; it’s essential. A few minutes spent configuring budget alerts today can save significant costs and prevent unwanted surprises in the future. Start setting up your AWS Budget Alerts today and take control of your cloud spending!

Thanks for reading!

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