A department in an organization has a stipulated monthly expenditure limit on their AWS account and is anxious about exceeding it. How can they allay this concern in the best possible way?

Answer options:

A.Regularly review their Billing and Cost management dashboard during the course of the month in the management console.
B.Under Billing Preferences > Cost Management Preferences, they should tick the Receive Free Tier Usage Alerts checkbox.
C.In AWS CloudWatch they ought to create an alarm that triggers each time the services bill surpasses the limit.
D.In AWS Budgets, creating an email alert based on the budget parameters would suffice.

Correct Answer – D
AWS Budgets provides a useful feature of setting custom budgets that prompt users when their costs or usage are forecasted to exceed. The forecast aspect gives a buffer period in advance when alerting the user. Budgets can be tracked monthly, quarterly, or yearly, and have customizable start and end dates. Alerts can be sent via email and/or Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) topic.
https://aws.amazon.com/aws-cost-management/aws-budgets/
Option A is INCORRECT because the regular review will not stop or alert the department if their service bill exceeds their stipulated budget.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/account-billing/index.html
Option B is INCORRECT because selecting the Receive Free Tier Usage Alerts checkbox would notify the department each time their service bills go out of the free-tier range only, not when it approaches the limit.
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2017/12/aws-free-tier-usage-alerts-automatically-notify-you-when-you-are-forecasted-to-exceed-your-aws-service-usage-limits/
Option C is INCORRECT because configuring an alarm in AWS CloudWatch that triggers after exceeding the bill will not meet the requirements of staying within the desired budget. The alarm triggers when the account billing exceeds the threshold specified. It triggers only when actual billing exceeds the threshold. It does not use projections based on the usage so far in the month.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/monitor_estimated_charges_with_cloudwatch.html