Set Up Billing Alarms Please
You and I both don't want to see you get smacked with a wild AWS bill. Well, I get a chuckle out of it sometimes
I've gotten a couple of chuckles and almost a whole chortle from LinkedIn posts about runaway AWS bills. You have too, don't lie. Or you got smacked by one and that sucks, sorry. I'm a big fan of the missing scale down policy but not knowing the instance types that you're renting is fun too. What really gets me is when someone gets hit and tries to turn a $10k bill into a sales pitch. Classic LinkedIn. Get off of social media and get your account set up. Protect your neck folks.
A budget alert is your first line of defense. When your estimated monthly charge passes a threshold, you get an email. You still have to fix the problem, which is a whole other can of worms, but at least you'll know that something is wrong. Five minutes of setup and you can save, quite literally, thousands of dollars.
AWS has better docs on the setup than I do, so I won't dive too deep here. Head to Billing → Budgets, create a cost budget, and set your monthly amount. Add your email as a recipient and you're done.
Budget data updates a few times a day, not in real time, so it's good for catching a runaway but not good to the penny. You can alert on actual spend or forecasted spend, and the forecast option is the one you want, it'll warn you before you blow past the number instead of after. One catch, budgets aren't totally free. You get two per account and then it's a couple cents a day each, but you can stack a pile of alert thresholds inside a single budget for free.
Set your thresholds lower than you think you need and stack a few. Budgets lets you set them as a percentage of the amount, so I'll put alerts at 10%, 25%, 50%, and 75% of what I expect/want to spend and judge things by when during the month each one lands. If I get my 50% alert on the 17th, I'm a happy camper. If I get it on the 5th then something smells funny. Nothing crazy, just a little predictable nudge.
That's the whole thing. Five minutes now, and the next time someone posts their surprise five-figure bill, you can just keep scrolling.
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