One of the main attractions of using AWS, is its pay-as-you-go model. You only pay for what you use, no more and no less.

Unfortunately, this can sometimes result in what's known as bill shock at the end of the month. This happens when you do something that you might not know is a charged service, or you do not know how much is charged for it, and you don't find out until it's too late. Especially when getting started, users may not fully appreciate the cost of the activities they're undertaking.

There are also ways to optimize your costs on AWS, for example, by transferring at slower speeds, removing external access, and so on. All this means that you should be aware of your cost obligations, and manage them in real time. To this end, you can create budgets that help you be aware of your usage and spending.

While you can create budgets via the AWS CLI tool, it is useful to know how the Billing dashboard works for administration purposes, so we will use the AWS console for this recipe.