Why cost management matters in AWS - See It in Action

Why Cost Management Matters in AWS

📖 Scenario: You are working as a cloud administrator for a small company that recently moved its applications to AWS. The company wants to keep cloud costs under control while using AWS services efficiently.

🎯 Goal: Build a simple AWS cost management setup using tags and budgets to track and control cloud spending.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a resource tag dictionary with specific AWS resources and their tags

Add a budget threshold variable to set a monthly spending limit

Write logic to identify resources exceeding the budget threshold

Complete the configuration by defining a budget alert notification

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Companies use cost management to avoid unexpected cloud bills and optimize spending on AWS resources.

💼 Career

Cloud administrators and financial managers need to track and control cloud costs to keep budgets on target.

1

Create AWS resource tags dictionary

Create a dictionary called resource_tags with these exact entries: 'EC2-Instance-1': {'Environment': 'Production', 'Owner': 'Alice'}, 'S3-Bucket-1': {'Environment': 'Development', 'Owner': 'Bob'}, 'RDS-Database-1': {'Environment': 'Production', 'Owner': 'Charlie'}

AWS

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

Need a hint?

Use a Python dictionary with resource names as keys and tag dictionaries as values.

2

Set monthly budget threshold

Create a variable called monthly_budget_limit and set it to 500 to represent the monthly spending limit in USD.

AWS

resource_tags = {
    'EC2-Instance-1': {'Environment': 'Production', 'Owner': 'Alice'},
    'S3-Bucket-1': {'Environment': 'Development', 'Owner': 'Bob'},
    'RDS-Database-1': {'Environment': 'Production', 'Owner': 'Charlie'}
}
# Create monthly_budget_limit variable and set it to 500
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a simple integer variable to hold the budget limit.

3

Identify resources exceeding budget

Create a dictionary called resource_costs with these exact entries: 'EC2-Instance-1': 300, 'S3-Bucket-1': 150, 'RDS-Database-1': 200. Then create a list called over_budget_resources that includes resource names from resource_costs where the cost is greater than monthly_budget_limit divided by 2.

AWS

resource_tags = {
    'EC2-Instance-1': {'Environment': 'Production', 'Owner': 'Alice'},
    'S3-Bucket-1': {'Environment': 'Development', 'Owner': 'Bob'},
    'RDS-Database-1': {'Environment': 'Production', 'Owner': 'Charlie'}
}

monthly_budget_limit = 500
# Create resource_costs dictionary and over_budget_resources list
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a dictionary for costs and a list comprehension to filter resources.

4

Define budget alert notification

Create a dictionary called budget_alert with keys 'threshold' set to monthly_budget_limit and 'notification_email' set to '[e-mail]'.

AWS

resource_tags = {
    'EC2-Instance-1': {'Environment': 'Production', 'Owner': 'Alice'},
    'S3-Bucket-1': {'Environment': 'Development', 'Owner': 'Bob'},
    'RDS-Database-1': {'Environment': 'Production', 'Owner': 'Charlie'}
}

monthly_budget_limit = 500

resource_costs = {
    'EC2-Instance-1': 300,
    'S3-Bucket-1': 150,
    'RDS-Database-1': 200
}

over_budget_resources = [resource for resource, cost in resource_costs.items() if cost > monthly_budget_limit / 2]
# Create budget_alert dictionary with threshold and notification_email
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a dictionary to hold alert configuration details.