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Derek Hutson

My Most Expensive AWS Mistake

Learn from my mistakes


 




 

I'm a firm believer in learning from others' mistakes.


So to help you a little, I'd like to share how I accidentally spent $327.36 in AWS (thank the lord for AWS credits, which saved me).


I was looking into migrating database instances from one engine to another recently, so I found a tutorial from AWS on how to do it.


Innocently enough, I followed along with it but ran into some errors along the way (tutorials are rarely perfect because of the rate the underlying technology changes). I did some troubleshooting for a couple of days, but naturally, I got distracted and put it down for a couple more days.


I eventually received a budgets alert one day that my spending had surpassed my budgeted amount, but unfortunately, budgets alone will not remediate all issues regarding runaway spending.


So about a week later, I took a look at my cost explorer and was shocked to find that I had amassed 327.36!


It took me a second to figure out why, but then it dawned on me, and I was quickly able to remediate it. According to RDS pricing, you pay for the storage you provision, even if you are not actively using it. Additionally, you pay for DB instance hours, with the price being based on the DB instance type you are consuming.


The tutorial I followed had me provision RDS instances much larger than those included in the free tier, and I was subsequently racking up costs all day and night over a week.


Thankfully I had a few hundred bucks in AWS credits that covered all of it (thank you, AWS community builders!), so I was able to avert disaster.


However, I can say with complete confidence that I will no longer forget how RDS pricing works, and hopefully, you can learn from my mistake as well.

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