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Ryan H Lewis
Ryan H Lewis

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How to Avoid Surprise AWS Bills

I remember the 13th month after I opened a personal AWS account pretty clearly.

Why the 13th month? Because that's when the free tier benefits ended for that account and I got an email bill with charges for resources that were running on my account.

Holy moley! That RDS database I hadn't touched in half a year was using up my video game money!

After I deleted anything running on my account, I did some research and found that I could set up a Billing Alert in CloudWatch to monitor my monthly bill.

With a $5 threshold on the billing alert, I was safe to sleep at night, knowing I'd be notified if the bill got to high.

But that alert was way too simple, so AWS created AWS Budgets that lets you create very specific alerts for your bill.

You can set alerts on service type, region, tags, and many other vectors.

With AWS Budgets you can have intelligent billing alarms that work well at any size organization.

Take a look at my video as I explain how AWS Budgets works and go through the process of setting one up.


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