Launch: AWS Service Catalog Integration with AWS Budgets

It is a uniquely difficult challenge to build a product that unifies something complex into something approachable and immediately usable. This theme was explored in a recent post about AWS Marketplace cost management, and today we’re going to dive into my new obsession: AWS Service Catalog.

AWS Service Catalog gives you the ability to create and manage your IT service catalog. You typically use AWS Service Catalog to create service portfolios for the products your end users access, which helps standardize and maintain compliance across your organization. I’m new to the AWS Service Catalog, so I sat down with Matt Cowsert, senior product manager (technical) for AWS Budgets, to learn more about how this feature set works within the AWS Cost Management product suite.

This post shows you how to get started with setting budgets based on your AWS Service Catalog portfolio and product costs.

Getting started with the AWS Service Catalog

Using AWS Service Catalog, you can build and manage custom portfolios that include any AWS-approved IT services, including anything from servers to software, from databases to full-fledged applications. This makes it easy for organizations to quickly deploy IT-curated solutions at scale.

For example, you can create a portfolio that includes a VPC and EC2 instances intended for a particular project. You can do this by navigating to the Portfolios tab.

In the screenshot below, you can see a summary of a sample compute portfolio.

Once you have reviewed your portfolio information, in many cases, it can make sense to set a budget to receive alerts that can proactively notify you to an unintended cost overrun. From there, choose the Actions menu in the top right corner and choose Create Budget.

The wizard prompts you to select the tag that you have applied to this portfolio. This portfolio tag is a system-generated tag applied at the time of portfolio creation. To track a specific aspect of your portfolio, you can also create custom tags from the TagOption library link, available in the left-hand sidebar menu.

From there, you can select the tag and choose Next. This takes you to AWS Budgets.

Setting an AWS Service Catalog portfolio budget

The setup wizard automatically selects the AWS Service Catalog portfolio tag that you selected in the Tag filtering dimension. You can refine the services, accounts, or specific products you track by the budget. In this example, you create a portfolio-level budget using the Tag budget parameter in AWS Budgets.

After you configure your budget, you can specify up to five thresholds for when you (and other stakeholders in your organization) should receive alerts. You can configure these alerts to trigger based on your actual costs, or based on your forecasted costs for the month.

After you complete your budget creation, the wizard returns you to the AWS Service Catalog console.

Now, when viewing your portfolios in Service Catalog, you can track the status of your budget. You can modify your portfolio budget at any time by accessing the AWS Budgets console through the Service Catalog portfolio details page or directly from the AWS Budgets console.

Conclusion

AWS Service Catalog gives you the ability to quickly deploy curated catalogs of services to your organization at scale. Integration with AWS Budgets takes this one step further by allowing you to better understand and monitor the costs associated with your IT portfolios and products. You can learn more about this launch here.