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prathamesh gawade
prathamesh gawade

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AWS Billing Fundamentals

Understanding how AWS bills you is important as you use AWS services more and more. Unattended resources impact the cost and accumulate at the end of the month when it's too late. That's why it is important to keep track of billing and set budgets to avoid getting surprises. For this very reason, we emphasize budgets.

If you don’t know what budgets and billing alerts are or haven’t set them up yet, first read this then log in to the AWS console to set budgets.

let’s first get an overview of AWS billing.


How AWS Bills you...

AWS charges you for the services you use, and each service has different components. For example, you get billed for instance usage, EBS storage, and IP addresses separately under EC2 service. Each element has its charge rates, which are very important to understand.

Now, how do you identify these charges? We’ll get to that later in the blog.


Billing and Cost Management

This is the service where you can find all the details regarding billing, alarms, cost consumption, and more.

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If you are facing permission issues, refer to the note at the end of this blog.


Budgets and Billing Alerts

Budgets and billing alerts are possibly the most important things to set up at any level when you’re using AWS. Billing alerts allow you to set a threshold amount for notifications. If your charges exceed that amount, you will be alerted (to oversimplify it).

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Billing alerts are helpful in scenarios where you are being billed more than expected, which in most cases is due to unnoticed resources, a surge in traffic, or similar issues.

For free-tier accounts, you should set a $0 spend budget to avoid incurring any bills and to be alerted when you use non-free-tier services.


Cost Explorer

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This analytics service helps you filter data by usage, services, time range, and more. You’ll be able to identify the exact resource and usage type that was billed. This often helps you identify unknown charges.

Tip: Filter the data by daily usage instead of monthly, by usage type, and within a specific range.


Additional Notes

  • If you haven’t paid your bills for three months, AWS suspends your account, and all services are disabled. You’ll need to make a payment to reactivate your account. However, your data is not deleted during the suspension.
  • Log in as the root user or provide necessary permissions to an IAM user. If you’re granting billing permissions to an IAM user, in addition to the policy, you also need to enable the checkbox that allows IAM users to access the billing dashboard.

These were the fundamentals for beginners.
Later..

Explore more -
1.https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2/billing-what-is.html

  1. https://repost.aws/questions/QUZMaZQIRZTLyPZ6dtsF4-4w/how-do-i-set-up-a-simplified-or-zero-cost-aws-budget

Top comments (7)

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msnmongare profile image
Sospeter Mong'are

Thank you for sharing this

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prathamesh_gawade_16 profile image
prathamesh gawade

My pleasure

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ProCoders

So helpful! Thank You!

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respect17 profile image
Kudzai Murimi

Helpful article, Thank you so much for sharing this useful info with the community

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prathamesh_gawade_16 profile image
prathamesh gawade

Most Welcome

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Abhishek Pathak

*nice writing *

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prathamesh_gawade_16 profile image
prathamesh gawade

Thank you bro