This is the ultimate guide to the corporate AWS budget. It includes the basics of budgeting, methods to build accurate budgets for AWS, and techniques for staying in budget.
If you want to:
- Spot the differences between a great AWS budget and a risky one
- Earn a seat at the annual budgeting table for engineering
- Learn budgeting skills not usually taught to engineers
- Acquire the rare skill of translating AWS technologies into financial plans
- Ensure your team can deliver to your AWS budget goals
Then this is the resource for you.
This is not an AWS Budgets tutorial
There’s a great little tool built by Amazon named AWS Budgets.
It’s built to give you tracking capabilities for your overall spend on Amazon Web Services, by enabling you to set tracking thresholds, like a number you enter from your company budget or a set percentage increase from your historical spending trends. From there, AWS Budgets will notify you if it looks like your spending is falling out of budget, and in some cases, the tool can actually take action like stopping servers or services.
Unfortunately, AWS Budgets is not a tool for creating the annual spending budget for your company’s AWS accounts. The good news is that this guide does give you the tools to build a bulletproof corporate AWS budget.
This guide is written in six parts. Consider this page your home base for each of the chapters included in the guide. We recommend working through each chapter in order, ensuring you’ve mastered the concepts in each before moving to the next.
Table of Contents
CHAPTER 1
- Evaluate the quality of your own company’s current AWS budget
- Describe the four traits of a phenomenal AWS budget
CHAPTER 2
- Explain the purpose of an annual budget
- Outline a typical timeline for the budgeting cycle
- Describe the steps taken during the budget preparation process and their deliverables
- Distinguish between major asset purchases and budgeted expenses
- Identify when budget mistakes could be carried forward and how to stop them
CHAPTER 3
- Understand the business implications of all AWS-billed spending
- Analyze and categorize AWS resource usage to build budget formulas
- Use business growth goals to inform AWS resource usage predictions
- Develop a monthly cost forecast based on usage predictions
CHAPTER 4
- Insert planned cost modeling into the budget preparation cycle
- Implement cost modeling programs based on best practices
- Describe the best use of native AWS modeling tools
- Develop flexible budget presentations for project negotiation and tradeoff analysis
CHAPTER 5
- Select cost optimization contracts for appropriate business scenarios
- Describe all the current cost optimization techniques available in the AWS ecosystem
- Implement a series of technical cost optimization techniques ideal for your infrastructure
- Model the impact of your selected cost optimizations into your AWS budget
CHAPTER 6
- Translate your company’s financial budget into technical terms for engineers
- Build a series of accountability measures to ensure budget monitoring
- Develop the policies and procedures for handling major spend decisions
