Lesson 28 / 28
Cost Management Basics
Control spend with AWS Budgets, Cost Explorer and resource tags that show where money goes.
AWS Budgets
AWS Budgets lets you set a spending threshold and get notified (email/SNS) as actual or forecasted cost approaches it — your early warning system.
Cost Explorer at a glance
Cost Explorer visualizes historical spend, filterable by service, region, or tag — helping you spot which resource is actually driving the bill.
Tag everything
Tag resources with a project, team, or environment label from day one. Without tags, Cost Explorer can only show totals — not who or what is responsible.
Quick check: You want an early email warning before monthly spend exceeds $100. What should you set up?
- A new IAM policy
- An AWS Budget with a notification threshold
- A CloudFront distribution
- An S3 bucket policy
Answer
An AWS Budget with a notification threshold — AWS Budgets is built exactly for setting a spend threshold and getting notified as it's approached.
Final quiz 1 of 8
Final quiz
Quick check: Which AWS service is object storage?
- EC2
- RDS
- S3
- IAM
Answer
S3 — S3 stores files as objects in buckets.
Final quiz 2 of 8
Final quiz
Quick check: What does least privilege recommend?
- Grant admin to everyone
- Share root credentials
- Disable IAM
- Grant only the permissions actually needed
Answer
Grant only the permissions actually needed — Start narrow and add as required.
Final quiz 3 of 8
Final quiz
Quick check: Why use multiple Availability Zones?
- To survive the failure of one data center
- To make code faster
- To lower the bill automatically
- To skip backups
Answer
To survive the failure of one data center — AZs are isolated data centers in a region.
Final quiz 4 of 8
Final quiz
Quick check: Which feature is a stateful virtual firewall for EC2?
- S3 bucket
- Security group
- CloudFront
- Route 53
Answer
Security group — Response traffic is allowed automatically.
Final quiz 5 of 8
Final quiz
Quick check: Which service runs code on events without servers?
- EC2
- RDS
- Lambda
- VPC
Answer
Lambda — You pay per invocation and duration.
Final quiz 6 of 8
Final quiz
Quick check: What does Block Public Access do?
- Encrypts objects
- Deletes old data
- Speeds up uploads
- Prevents buckets from becoming public
Answer
Prevents buckets from becoming public — It overrides accidental public policies.
Final quiz 7 of 8
Final quiz
Quick check: Which service is AWS's CDN?
- CloudFront
- Route 53
- SQS
- Aurora
Answer
CloudFront — CloudFront caches content at edge locations.
Final quiz 8 of 8
Final quiz
Quick check: Why tag AWS resources?
- To make them faster
- To see who and what is driving cost
- To encrypt them
- To skip IAM
Answer
To see who and what is driving cost — Cost Explorer can group spend by tag.