Billing, Cost Monitoring, and Budgets - Green-Biome-Institute/AWS GitHub Wiki
This information is only a priority to the administrative people of the organization, however it is relevant for everyone to understand how this part of AWS. To reiterate a common theme from this github documentation: pay-as-you-go is synonymous with pay for everything you use! If you allocate a resource in AWS, your account will be billed for it. So having clarity over how transparent costs and billing are is important.
Billing & Cost Monitoring
The Cost Explorer is AWS's method for allowing the root user to track usage of AWS services on that account. You are able to track the costs associated with all resources used, filtered by resource type, date, region, cost category, user, and tag! Remember, all of our resources will be tagged by the users, thereby giving the root user the ability to see AWS usage from the top-level (ex.: how much are we paying for EC2 instances this month?) to a granular level (ex.: How much did that A. Pallida assembly done by user 001 last May cost?).
At the end of each month AWS bills the account, which is paid either by a credit card on file or deducted from the money given to us through grants.
Budgets
AWS allows us to set up budgets that are associated with any service on the GBI account. We are currently talking about the best way to implement this for our purposes. That way we can pair our needs with what AWS offers.
First, we can set up basic budgets with alerts. These budgets would be the first measure of monitoring usage. They can alert up to 10 people via email or text message that a budget is on its way to being exceeded. For example if you have a budget of $1000 for the month of July, you can set an alert that will tell you when your account has used some percentage of your total. If you set an alert at 80%, it will notify all the relevant people when $800 has been used. It can also be set to set an alert based on predicted usage. If the forecasted cost for the month is over your budget you will be alerted.
Individual services (like EC2 instances, S3 buckets, or even possibly users themselves) can have budgets associated with them as well. Once the users are created, they can be monitored for their own personal use with AWS budgets.
I am still looking into this, but it seems possible to set up a last-resort backstop. If a user or resource is accruing costs far past what they/it should, AWS Budgets will automatically stop (possibly deleting) that user/resource. More information on this is coming.