AWS recently announced that its Budgets service now supports an enhancement in Billing View, a change that enables organizations to better manage and monitor cross-account cloud costs. With this new feature, users can create budgets that span multiple member accounts without requiring access to the management account, which helps streamline budget management while maintaining security best practices.
Previously, budgeting across multiple AWS accounts posed a challenge for organizations. According to a post on LinkedIn by freelance consultant Tobias Schmidt, the options were often limited to giving more people access to the management account or accepting inaccurate budgets for anything that spanned multiple accounts. The integration of Billing View is a direct solution to this problem, offering a more secure and accurate approach.
The underlying mechanism for this feature is the Billing View itself, which is treated as an AWS resource identified by an Amazon Resource Name (ARN). By default, each account has a primary billing view with all its cost data. For organizations, the management account’s primary view contains consolidated data for all member accounts. The key to this new feature is the ability to create a custom billing view, which is a filtered subset of this data.
With this enhancement, organizations can create budgets based on filtered views of cost management data, either by cost allocation tags or by specific AWS accounts within the organization. Different teams can leverage this flexibility by aligning their budget monitoring with their specific business and operational needs. For example, engineering leaders can create application-specific budgets using views filtered by cost allocation tags. At the same time, FinOps teams can manage organization-wide budgets with unfiltered views, all without needing management account access.
AWS Serverless Hero Vadym Kazulkin noted on X that this update is a benefit for organizations, as it allows them to create and monitor budgets across member accounts without granting access to the central management account. Moreover, Fredrik Tunvall, a Senior Product Manager for Technical, AWS Billing and Cost Management, highlighted the benefits in a LinkedIn post, including streamlined budget management and enhanced security.
While this is a new feature for AWS Budgets, competitors like Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud offer similar capabilities. Both Microsoft Azure’s Cost Management and Billing and Google Cloud’s Cloud Billing allow organizations to set budgets, monitor spending across multiple accounts or projects, and analyze costs through customizable reports.
Currently, the new feature is available in all AWS regions where both AWS Budgets and Billing View are supported, except for the AWS GovCloud (US) and China Regions.
