Billing dashboard overview in AWS - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Billing dashboard overview

📖 Scenario: You work for a small company that wants to track its AWS costs. Your manager asked you to create a simple billing dashboard overview using AWS Cost Explorer data.This dashboard will help the team see monthly costs and identify the top three AWS services by cost.

🎯 Goal: Build a basic AWS billing dashboard overview that fetches monthly cost data and lists the top three AWS services by cost.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a dictionary with AWS services and their monthly costs

Add a threshold variable to filter services with costs above a certain amount

Use a loop to select the top three services by cost above the threshold

Complete the dashboard configuration with a summary section showing total cost

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Companies use billing dashboards to monitor cloud costs and optimize spending.

💼 Career

Cloud engineers and financial analysts often build cost reports and dashboards to manage budgets.

1

Create AWS services cost dictionary

Create a dictionary called service_costs with these exact entries: 'EC2': 120.50, 'S3': 75.30, 'Lambda': 45.00, 'RDS': 90.00, 'CloudFront': 30.25

AWS

# Create the service_costs dictionary with exact entries
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use curly braces to create a dictionary with service names as keys and costs as values.

2

Add cost threshold variable

Add a variable called cost_threshold and set it to 50 to filter services with costs above this value.

AWS

service_costs = {
    'EC2': 120.50,
    'S3': 75.30,
    'Lambda': 45.00,
    'RDS': 90.00,
    'CloudFront': 30.25
}
# Add cost_threshold variable below
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Just create a variable named cost_threshold and assign the number 50.

3

Select top three services above threshold

Create a list called top_services that contains the names of the top three services from service_costs with costs above cost_threshold. Use a loop with variables service and cost to filter and sort the services by cost in descending order.

AWS

service_costs = {
    'EC2': 120.50,
    'S3': 75.30,
    'Lambda': 45.00,
    'RDS': 90.00,
    'CloudFront': 30.25
}
cost_threshold = 50
# Create top_services list with top three services above cost_threshold
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a dictionary comprehension to filter, then sort the items by cost descending, then select the top three service names.

4

Add total cost summary to dashboard

Add a variable called total_cost that sums all values in service_costs. Then create a dictionary called dashboard with keys 'top_services' and 'total_cost' holding the respective values.

AWS

service_costs = {
    'EC2': 120.50,
    'S3': 75.30,
    'Lambda': 45.00,
    'RDS': 90.00,
    'CloudFront': 30.25
}
cost_threshold = 50
filtered_services = {service: cost for service, cost in service_costs.items() if cost > cost_threshold}
sorted_services = sorted(filtered_services.items(), key=lambda item: item[1], reverse=True)
top_services = [service for service, cost in sorted_services[:3]]
# Add total_cost and dashboard dictionary below
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use the sum() function on service_costs.values() and create a dictionary with the required keys and values.