Is there a way to set Amazon AWS payment limit?

Question

I am building an application on top of Amazon S3. How can I keep my S3 under the established budget? Suppose I don’t want unexpected traffic to exceed the value of my AWS account. I would prefer it to remain inaccessible.

Answer 1

Unable to set budget for AWS.

But this function is requested very often, so it will probably be implemented one day.

https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=58127

Answer 2

AWS announced the general functionality of Monitoring Settlement Payments using billing alerts through Amazon CloudWatch dated May 10, 2012 (which, according to Daniel Lopez’s response [+1], has been available for AWS premium accounts since the end of 2011):

We regularly evaluate the total monthly fee for each AWS service that you use. When you turn on monitoring for your account, we start by saving estimates as CloudWatch metrics, where they will remain available for the usual 14-day period. [...]

As indicated in the introductory blog post, you can start using billing alerts to let you know when your AWS account is higher than expected, see For more information on this feature, view your estimated payments using Amazon CloudWatch .

This is already very useful for many basic needs, however, using the CloudWatch API to retrieve saved metrics yourself (see the GetMetricStatistics API and Getting statistics for a metric to use samples) actually allows you to control arbitrary workflows and business logic based on this data.

Regarding the latter, the scope of this proposal is also emphasized, although:

It is important to note that these are estimates, not forecasts . The estimate approximates the cost of using AWS today within the current billing cycle and will increase as you continue to consume resources . [...] It does not accept trends or potential changes in your AWS usage model in your account. [emphasis mine]

Answer 3

There still seems to be no solution provided by Amazon.

Take a look at Amazon Price-Watcher - keep track of your account and automatically close your instances

So, here is a basic script that I put together in Python that will sit and control the current price of your instance and close it if it overcomes a certain price limit. (In the future, this may be changed, possibly by throttling the incoming bandwidth or by admin email).

Answer 4

As of December 2011, if you have an AWS premium account, you can use CloudWatch to monitor your estimated expenses, and if they exceed a certain limit, you can initiate various actions (for example, turning off the computer)

http://blog.bitnami.org/2011/12/monitor-your-estimated-aws-charges-with.html