6 Forecasting and Budgeting
This chapter covers
- Using AWS Cost Explorer for basic cost forecasting
- Leveraging AWS CUR and Amazon SageMaker for advanced forecasting models
- Estimating the cost of new projects using the AWS Pricing Calculator
- Creating and managing budgets for teams, departments, or cost centers on AWS
- Setting up AWS Cost Anomaly Detection to identify and respond to unexpected cost spikes
- Applying forecasting, budgeting, and anomaly detection techniques in multi-cloud environments
In FinOps, being able to forecast cloud costs and set budgets is important for keeping expenses under control and planning ahead. Without these practices, unexpected cloud bills could hurt your company’s financial stability. In the previous chapter, we learned how to build FinOps dashboards to track the current cost as well as track cost over time. This chapter will leverage this data to predict your cloud spending, starting with AWS native tools before moving to a multi-cloud setup.
First, we'll cover why cost forecasting matters and how to use basic AWS services like Cost Explorer to look at past spending and predict future costs. For more advanced forecasting, we’ll dive into using Amazon SageMaker and AWS Cost and Usage Reports (CUR) to make more accurate predictions with real data.