The AWS Bill Shock

A $2,000 AWS bill. A team in panic. And servers we forgot we even had. The story of how we negotiated our way from disaster to discipline.

CTO takeaway

The lesson, minus the scar tissue.

Set up AWS Budget Alerts at 50%, 75%, and 100% of your monthly spend. Then actually check them.
Tag everything. Environment, owner, purpose. If you can't tag it, you can't track it.
Build a 'shutdown schedule' for non-production environments. No one needs a dev server running at 3 AM.
AWS support can be surprisingly generous with refunds. But they'll only do it once. Don't waste your one free pass.

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