Review billing dashboard and set up a billing alarm to avoid paying too much for AWS

Instructor: [0:00] When experimenting with AWS, we may want to stay within the free tier in order to avoid paying for the service. In order to find out how much are we paying for the services that we use today, click on your account name and go to billing dashboard. Otherwise, you can search for billing in the search box over here.

[0:15] After choosing billing, we are going to be redirected to a billing and cost management dashboard. As we can see, currently I'm not spending much on AWS. We can see on this graph over here that my bill for the last month, and also for the current month, is exactly zero dollars, because on this account, I am trying to stay within the free tier.

[0:32] In order to find out how much are you using from the free tier, you can checkout top free tier services by usage table. Here, we can see that I am using .04 percent of the free Amazon as free storage, and for instance, I've also used .03 percent of Free AWS Lambda function invocation. But this might change.

[0:50] What I would like to do is to avoid excess charges whenever my services start to get a bit more traffic and attention. In order to do that, we're going to set up a billing alarm. First up, click on Services and search for "Cloud Watch," and click. We are going to see the Cloud Watch console.

[1:06] Next, click on the Billing section in the menu over here, and here we can create a billing alarm. By default, you get 10 free alarms and 1,000 free email notifications each month as a part of AWS free tier.

[1:17] To create an alarm, first up, we have to track a metric. This alarm is going to track an estimated charges metric in American dollars. Whenever this value is going to be greater than, for instance, five dollars, I would like to trigger an alarm, because that might mean that I'm using something that I may not actually need, and I would like to avoid paying too much for AWS on this free-tier account.

[1:37] Next up, click on Next, and here we're going to set up a notification. Whenever this alarm is in "Alarm" state, that means that I'm paying over five dollars. I would like to send a notification to my email.

[1:48] Next, let's create a new Simple Notification Service topic. I'm going to call it "Paying Too Much for AWS Alarm," and I'm going to send it to my email. Next, we're going to click on Create Topic.

[1:58] Once a topic is created, go ahead, click on Next, and define an alarm name. I'm going to use the exactly the same name I have for the topic, so "I'm Paying Too Much for AWS" and click on Next.

[2:08] Here I can review my alarm. Here I'm going to see that I'm tracking the estimated charges. Whenever the estimated charges is greater than five dollars, I would like to trigger this alarm, sending a notification to my email and go ahead and create an alarm.

[2:22] This alarm is not yet 100 percent active, because it's pending confirmation. As we can see over here, Amazon SNS doesn't send messages to an endpoint until the subscription is confirmed, so open up your inbox and click on the link in the email.