Cost Management

An important component of managing any IT system is managing cost. With the pay-as-you-go nature of the cloud, costs can spiral quite quickly if they are not being monitored. In this section, you will learn about three services that can help you understand and keep on top of your AWS costs: AWS Budgets, AWS Cost Explorer, and AWS Cost and Usage Reports. We will not go into huge detail, but it’s important you understand the differences between them for the exam.

AWS Budgets

AWS Budgets enables users to monitor and manage their AWS spending. One of the key features of AWS Budgets is the ability to create budgets for specific services, cost categories, or the overall AWS account. These budgets can be set based on actual spend, forecasted spend, or a combination of both.

If a budget is exceeded, you can configure an automated action to run, such as applying an IAM policy or SCP, or targeting an EC2 or RDS instance to be stopped.

AWS Cost Explorer

One...