The principal feature of public clouds, such as AWS, is variable spend (most services are provided on the pay-as-you-go principle), in contrast to private data centers where most of the costs are fixed.
While this allows for unlimited innovation and unlimited agility, when misconfigured or misused it can also lead to unlimited bills – see these real incidents: We Burnt $72K testing Firebase + Cloud Run and almost went Bankrupt [Part 1] | Milkie Way (tomilkieway.com) or How Adobe Lost $80K a Day to Cloud Costs – Teampay | Teampay.
To get maximum value from your AWS cost we recommend adopting FinOps Best Practices as defined by the FinOps Foundation.
In addition, we recommend using these AWS complimentary services for cloud cost management:
AWS Budgets
AWS Budgets is an AWS service that allows you to set custom budgets to monitor your costs, and alerts you via email or SNS notifications whenever the actual or forecast costs exceed your budget’s alerting threshold. SNS notification allows you to set up an automated action to reduce further costs.
Notice: unlike other cloud providers’ budgets, the budgets are soft, i.e. AWS allows you to exceed them and does not stop excess cloud cost.
To set up a budget, follow these steps.
AWS Cost Anomaly Detection
Most unexpected AWS costs arise as anomalies or outliers on the expected total bill amount time series. AWS Cost Anomaly detection is an AWS service that monitors your AWS bill and alerts you whenever there is an anomaly.
To set up an Anomaly Detection monitor, follow these steps.