Enforcing Financial Governance on AI Projects with AWS Budgets.

Question

Pulumi · Accepted Answer

When working on AI projects within AWS, it's important to keep a close eye on the financial aspects to ensure that you don't exceed your budget due to the potentially high costs associated with computational resources, storage, and data transfer. AWS Budgets is a service that allows you to set custom budgets that alert you when your costs or usage exceed (or are forecasted to exceed) your budgeted amount.

Using Pulumi, we can programmatically set up AWS budgets to help enforce financial governance on your AI projects. This can help project leads and financial administrators track resource usage and manage costs more effectively.

Here's a Python program using Pulumi to create a budget for an AWS account. This budget will notify us when the actual or forecasted costs exceed 90% of the budgeted amount.

```python
import pulumi
import pulumi_aws as aws

# Create an AWS Budget for AI Project Costs
# Make sure to replace the placeholder values with your specific details.
# - budget_limit_amount: The total amount of cost or usage being measured for a budget.
# - sns_topic_arn: The SNS topic ARN for sending budget alerts.
# - email_addresses: A list of email addresses to receive budget alerts.

budget_limit_amount = "1000"  # The total budget amount in your currency
sns_topic_arn = "arn:aws:sns:us-east-1:123456789012:MyBudgetNotificationTopic"
email_addresses = ["alice@example.com", "bob@example.com"]

# Creating the AWS Budget for your AI project
ai_project_budget = aws.budgets.Budget("aiProjectBudget",
                                        budget_type="COST",
                                        limit_amount=budget_limit_amount,
                                        limit_unit="USD",
                                        time_unit="MONTHLY",
                                        time_period_start=pulumi.Output.from_input("2024-01-01_00:00"),
                                        notifications=[
                                            {
                                                "comparison_operator": "GREATER_THAN",
                                                "notification_type": "ACTUAL",
                                                "threshold": 90,
                                                "threshold_type": "PERCENTAGE",
                                                "subscriber_email_addresses": email_addresses,
                                                "subscriber_sns_topic_arns": [sns_topic_arn],
                                            },
                                            {
                                                "comparison_operator": "GREATER_THAN",
                                                "notification_type": "FORECASTED",
                                                "threshold": 90,
                                                "threshold_type": "PERCENTAGE",
                                                "subscriber_email_addresses": email_addresses,
                                                "subscriber_sns_topic_arns": [sns_topic_arn],
                                            },
                                        ])

pulumi.export("budget_id", ai_project_budget.id)

```

In the above Pulumi Python program, we define an AWS Budget (`aws.budgets.Budget`) which sets a limit of $1000 USD on a monthly basis. If the actual or forecasted costs exceed 90% of this amount, the budget will trigger alerts. These alerts are sent through AWS Simple Notification Service (SNS) to the specified SNS topic ARN and to the listed email addresses.

This is a proactive way to manage costs, as it allows you and your team to be informed as soon as your AI project spend approaches the budget cap. This can lead to more informed decisions about resource utilization before costs spiral out of control.

Make sure to replace `sns_topic_arn`, `budget_limit_amount`, and `email_addresses` with your specific details, such as the intended amount for the budget, the appropriate SNS topic ARN for your environment, and the emails to be notified.

Remember to set up the SNS topic in AWS and subscribe the appropriate team members or services before running this program, so that alerts can be received as expected.

Lastly, export the `budget_id` at the end of the program to get the ID of the budget that you create, which can be useful for future references in Pulumi or AWS console.

By regularly monitoring usage and taking advantage of budget alerts, you can enforce financial governance effectively across your AI projects in AWS.