# Cost Management Basics — AWS Fundamentals: Core Services for Cloud Beginners

Source: https://www.skillbyai.com/en/aws/aws-cost-management

> 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.

**Quiz:** You want an early email warning before monthly spend exceeds $100. What should you set up?

- [ ] A new IAM policy
- [x] 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

**Quiz:** Which AWS service is object storage?

- [ ] EC2
- [ ] RDS
- [x] S3
- [ ] IAM

*Answer:* S3. S3 stores files as objects in buckets.

## Final quiz 2 of 8

Final quiz

**Quiz:** What does least privilege recommend?

- [ ] Grant admin to everyone
- [ ] Share root credentials
- [ ] Disable IAM
- [x] 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

**Quiz:** Why use multiple Availability Zones?

- [x] 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

**Quiz:** Which feature is a stateful virtual firewall for EC2?

- [ ] S3 bucket
- [x] Security group
- [ ] CloudFront
- [ ] Route 53

*Answer:* Security group. Response traffic is allowed automatically.

## Final quiz 5 of 8

Final quiz

**Quiz:** Which service runs code on events without servers?

- [ ] EC2
- [ ] RDS
- [x] Lambda
- [ ] VPC

*Answer:* Lambda. You pay per invocation and duration.

## Final quiz 6 of 8

Final quiz

**Quiz:** What does Block Public Access do?

- [ ] Encrypts objects
- [ ] Deletes old data
- [ ] Speeds up uploads
- [x] Prevents buckets from becoming public

*Answer:* Prevents buckets from becoming public. It overrides accidental public policies.

## Final quiz 7 of 8

Final quiz

**Quiz:** Which service is AWS's CDN?

- [x] CloudFront
- [ ] Route 53
- [ ] SQS
- [ ] Aurora

*Answer:* CloudFront. CloudFront caches content at edge locations.

## Final quiz 8 of 8

Final quiz

**Quiz:** Why tag AWS resources?

- [ ] To make them faster
- [x] 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.