Welcome to another way of tracking or utilizing your savings options. It is none other than AWS Free Tier services. Right utilization of services under Free tier gives us chances of savings, a true place to look out for savings
Most of the services falls under AWS Free Tier and if the business case supports & if the account has been created/new, then it is a wise way to utilize all services falling under Free Tier( for the first 12 months)
As saying is lot easier than being done, teams go ahead & use the services but how do you keep track of the services usage or free tier limit, as charges will apply post the time range. So, there are three key ways to keep track of services under free tier and use them to the best of it. Below are those
Option 1 - Create Free Tier Alerts
i) Get notified for "AWS Free Tier Usage Alerts" by opting in for email notifications
ii) This setting has to be done from the "AWS Billing -> Billing Preferences page"
Option 2 - Using AWS Free Tier Tracker View
i) Another option to track the total Free Tier Services all in one single view is to access view from "Free Tier" menu from AWS Billing menu
ii) Month to Date usage & Month to Date Forecast along with total free count/requests against current utilization is reported
iii) Quite useful to know the actual usage and left overs, so that we can plan workloads & services accordingly
Option 3 - Creating a ZeroSpend Budget
Finally, we can create an "AWS Budget" of type "ZeroSpend" which means you will be alerted to the given email ids, on bill reaching > $0.01 which actually is above the AWS Free Tier limits. Hence usage/utilization above $0.01 is reported in this budget alert category, thus notifying that some service is being used up or other words, account has crossed free tier limits
i) Further below is the configuration part; a name for "ZeroSpend" budget
ii) Email id(s) to which the notification to be sent, in case of exceeding the free tier limit
iii) Now, create the budget and only look out for alert email to action, rather checking bills or services status' daily
Happy Savings !!
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