Article originally published on LinkedIn on 2025-02-26.
Source: https://fr.linkedin.com/pulse/la-gestion-des-ressources-est-base-de-lutilisation-cloud-menzikoff-6ysse

Migrating your infrastructure to Amazon Web Services (AWS) can sometimes be scary financially. Many imagine that ultimately, any business on AWS will end up with an out-of-control bill. However, this inevitability is a myth: it is entirely possible to manage your cloud budget well from the start. By taking a proactive approach, organizations can even eliminate much of the waste.

For example, a RightScale study found that up to 35% of cloud spend is wasted on average – an avoidable cost with good governance (How to Prevent Unexpected Costs for Startups While Building with AWS. - AWS Startups).

By establishing budgetary safeguards and monitoring practices from the start, you can avoid the “explosion” of your AWS bill and keep your expenses under control.

The objective of this article is to explain in an educational and neutral manner the best practices and AWS tools that help control costs so that the cloud remains an asset, and not a source of unpleasant financial surprises.

Best practices for controlling AWS costs#

To get the most out of AWS without uncontrolled overruns, cost management discipline must be established from the start. Here are some proven best practices:

  • Define a forecast budget from the start: Before even launching your first instances, determine a target monthly/annual cloud budget. Use AWS Budgets to set this budget and receive alerts if it drifts. For example, one can establish budgets for each AWS account or service to maintain visibility and control of expenses. Having a clear budget from the start makes it possible to guide technical choices according to their financial impact, and to avoid deviations from the first months.

    • Use suitable environments and avoid over-provisioning: Adopt a multi-environment architecture (production, staging, development) to allocate to each use the resources it really needs. AWS recommends dividing your workloads into prod, test and dev environments to more easily track the operational costs specific to each. Avoid using expensive production instances for testing or dev work. It is also crucial to size resources correctly: an oversized instance or an unused service can inflate the bill for nothing. Regularly analyze the effective use of resources and adjust the size of instances, databases, etc. as a result (underutilization = wasted money).- Automate the shutdown of unused resources: One of the common causes of budget overruns is leaving resources running 24/7 that are only needed at certain times. Implement automatic shutdown mechanisms for instances and services outside of hours of use. For example, development environments are typically only used 8 hours per day during the week, so we can shut down these resources the rest of the time to save ~75% of costs. AWS offers solutions like Instance Scheduler to schedule the shutdown/resumption of instances on a schedule, providing up to 70% savings on daytime-only workloads. By automating this process (scripts, AWS Lambda, Instance Scheduler), you avoid manual oversights and reduce overconsumption.

    • Choose the right billing options: AWS offers several pricing models. Do not systematically remain on-demand if your use is stable or predictable. Evaluate Reserved Instances and Savings Plans which offer significant discounts in exchange for a long-term commitment. For example, reserving instances for 1 or 3 years can entitle you to discounts of up to 75% compared to the on-demand price. Likewise, Savings Plans (more flexible because they apply to different types of instances or services) allow substantial savings to be made over the duration of the commitment. Take the time to analyze your consumption profile: if you know that a certain capacity will be used continuously, it is much more profitable to opt for a reserved commitment rather than paying by the hour. Conversely, use Spot Instances for temporary or interruption-tolerant workloads (tests, batches) to benefit from very reduced prices. In summary, always check the most suitable pricing model for each AWS resource to avoid unpleasant billing surprises.

    • Raise team awareness of costs and optimization: Controlling cloud expenses is not just an isolated technical or financial issue – it is a culture to be disseminated throughout the company. Teams must be held accountable for costs and made a success criterion in the same way as performance or reliability. Concretely, ensure that developers, ops and project managers understand the financial impact of their deployments. Establish performance indicators associated with expenses (e.g. cost per user, cost per feature deployed) and track them regularly. Clearly identify the action levers to reduce costs at each level (turn off an unnecessary instance, optimize code to consume less CPU, etc.), and give teams visibility into these elements. The more teams have access to cost information (dashboards, monthly reports by project) and the tools to act, the more inclined they will be to adopt a continuous optimization approach. Ultimately, this collective mobilization around FinOps ensures constant vigilance and avoids slippages in the long term.### AWS tools to monitor and control your budget

AWS provides numerous native tools to help you monitor your cloud expenses in real time and identify areas for savings. Here are five essential AWS cost management tools, and how they can help you:

  • AWS Cost Explorer: This is the starting point for analyzing your costs. AWS Cost Explorer provides a visual interface to view and analyze AWS expenses over different time periods. We can thus see the evolution of costs over the last 13 months, obtain forecasts for the coming months based on trends, and identify which services, accounts or regions generate the most expenses. Cost Explorer allows you to apply filters (by department, by project, by team, etc.) and create personalized reports. In short, it provides a clear overview of your spending trends and helps spot anomalies or costliest items. It is a free tool accessible from the AWS console, which it is recommended to activate as soon as possible to establish regular monitoring of the invoice.

    • AWS Budgets: This is the tool of choice for defining and tracking your cloud budgets. AWS Budgets allows you to create personalized budgets (for example an overall monthly budget, or a budget per department/project) and above all to be alerted when you approach or exceed these limits. Concretely, you define a threshold (in euros or as a percentage of the budget used) and AWS sends notifications as soon as this threshold is reached. This tool is essential to avoid end-of-month surprises: by receiving an alert as soon as a budget is about to be exceeded, you can take proactive measures (investigate the origin of costs, stop an abnormal resource, etc.). AWS Budgets can track both costs and usage (e.g. computing hours consumed) or the utilization rate of reserved instances. In short, it is your budget dashboard: it ensures that actual consumption remains aligned with your forecasts, and alerts you in the event of a discrepancy.- AWS Cost Anomaly Detection: This is a newer service that uses machine learning to automatically detect any abnormal usage of your AWS services. Rather than having to manually inspect your expense curves, you can rely on this tool which will identify cost “exceptions” (for example a sudden and unexplained increase in the bill for a specific service). As soon as an anomaly is detected, AWS Cost Anomaly Detection sends a detailed alert (by email or via AWS Budgets) indicating the service concerned and the deviation observed from normal. The great strength of this tool is that it quickly alerts you in the event of an unexpected deviation, allowing you to act before the situation deteriorates on the invoice. It is also highly customizable: you can segment by spending groups, define the sensitivity of detections, etc., in order to adapt it to your context. In short, it’s a safety net that works 24/7 to alert you to any unusual cost behavior, preventing surprise bills related to a configuration error or unexpected spike.

    • AWS Trusted Advisor: AWS Trusted Advisor is an inspection service that analyzes your AWS environment and provides personalized recommendations to optimize costs, performance, security and reliability. From a cost point of view, Trusted Advisor includes a series of financial optimization “checks” which will raise alerts on specific points. For example, it can identify underutilized or downright unused resources (like EC2 instances running at less than 5% CPU utilization, unattached EBS volumes, etc.) and suggest you delete them to save money. It also flags opportunities to use more favorable pricing models: for example, if you have a number of constantly active on-demand instances, Trusted Advisor may recommend that you convert them to reserved instances to pay less. In short, it monitors your spending in the background and alerts you to obvious “waste”. Note that some Trusted Advisor checks (notably those related to costs) are available free to all AWS customers, while other more advanced checks require Business/Enterprise support. However, even in its basic version, it is a valuable tool for benefiting from AWS best practices. It would be a shame to do without it, especially since it centralizes many actionable recommendations into a dashboard.

By combining these tools you have a complete toolbox to keep control of your AWS expenses. The important thing is to integrate them into your processes from the start of your cloud adventure, in order to establish a culture of controlled costs.

Implementation of budget alerts visible to all#

Having indicators is good — making them visible and acting on them in real time is better. Transparency and responsiveness are essential to avoid unpleasant billing surprises. Here’s how to set up effective budget alerts that are shared within the organization:

  • Configure AWS Budgets with proactive notifications: After defining your budgets in AWS Budgets, make sure to configure alerts on thresholds (for example 50%, 80%, 100% of the budget consumed). These alerts can be sent by email to project managers, the cloud administrator, but also directly to the teams concerned. AWS Budgets allows you to add alert recipients through Amazon SNS. You can plug these notifications into multiple channels. In particular, it is possible to receive Budget alerts directly in Slack or Amazon Chime by configuring AWS Chatbot. For example, a best practice is to create a #aws-budgets Slack channel where each threshold violation alert will be posted in real time for the entire team to see. This transparency prevents information from remaining siloed to the financial department or the cloud admin: everyone is aware in the event of a deviation, which encourages a rapid reaction.

    • Encourage transparency to empower teams: Making alerts visible to all relevant members (and not just management) has a virtuous effect. As mentioned above, giving operational teams visibility on costs and the means to act mobilizes them in the long term. Rather than “blaming” after the fact, involve the teams upstream: if a budget alert is triggered, the information being shared, the technical team will know that it must investigate and optimize, and the product/commercial team will understand the impact of certain decisions. This creates a culture of collective responsibility for costs. Everyone realizes that their use of the cloud has a measurable cost that must be optimized, a bit like turning off the light when leaving a room so as not to waste electricity.- Define alert thresholds and intervention mechanisms: Not all alerts are equal. It is advisable to establish different levels of alert thresholds with associated action plans. For example: at 50% of the budget reached too quickly, simple warning notification; 80% reached well before the end of the month, team meeting to review cost items; 100% achieved (overrun), escalation to management and possibly immediate technical actions (stopping certain non-critical resources, emergency patch to correct a resource leak, etc.). You can formalize a small runbook for reacting to budget alerts so that everyone knows what to do in the event of an overrun. The important thing is to act before the end of the month: the longer you wait, the worse the overrun becomes. Additionally, AWS Budgets offers a Budget Actions feature that can automate corrective actions (e.g., disabling a service or reducing a quota) when certain thresholds are crossed. Used prudently, this automation can prevent additional costs, but it must be configured wisely (e.g. not shutting down a critical service unexpectedly). Regardless, the combination of indicators + real-time alerts + response procedure constitutes a pillar of solid FinOps governance. Continuous monitoring dashboards, coupled with configurable alerts, are a central element of FinOps management to quickly identify anomalies and launch corrective actions.

By making costs visible, understandable and actionable by everyone, we establish a culture of transparency. Everyone knows where the cloud budget stands, everyone can help avoid it being exceeded. This shared approach demystifies the AWS invoice (which is no longer an obscure document discovered at the end of the month) and transforms it into a business indicator monitored almost daily.

The importance of AWS expertise to get started#

Even when following best practices and using the tools, managing AWS costs can be complex for the uninitiated. The cloud brings unprecedented freedom and flexibility, but this power can also lead to costly mistakes if you don’t have sufficient experience. This is why it often makes sense to call on an AWS expert (cloud architect, FinOps consultant, certified partner) from the start of your cloud project.

An expert who knows AWS well will be able to design an architecture optimized not only for performance and reliability, but also for cost. For example, it will be able to choose the AWS services best suited to your needs while avoiding those whose cost/use ratio would be unfavorable. It will be able to put in place from the initial deployment the mechanisms for self-extinction, resource tagging, cost dashboarding, etc., which we have mentioned. Being supported in the implementation of best practices from the start saves time and money: you avoid the classic pitfalls (forgotten resources, chronic oversizing, poor storage option, etc.) which weigh down the bill for many cloud novices. As one industry player points out, cloud resource management is a complex area, and it’s easy to get lost in the details. Having an experienced guide by your side allows you to navigate this teeming AWS ecosystem with confidence.

Investing in AWS expertise also provides a rapid return on investment. Of course, calling on a specialist has an initial cost (consulting mission, architecture time, etc.), but the savings subsequently made month after month thanks to a well-controlled architecture very quickly compensate for this investment. We often see that optimizing a few percent of the AWS bill thanks to best practices is enough to make the intervention of an expert profitable.

Contrary to popular belief, AWS does not have to rhyme with an uncontrolled explosion of costs. With rigorous and anticipatory management, it is entirely possible to get the most out of the AWS cloud without blowing your budget.

By adopting a disciplined and equipped approach, the AWS cloud becomes a real strength for your business – a source of agility and innovation – without draining your finances. In short, controlling AWS costs is an entirely surmountable challenge.