AWS Billing: 5 things you should do right now

cloudacademy.com

4 points·alexcasalboni··4 comments

#6 - make sure you completely read and understand what your paying for.

Earlier this year, I was trying to plan a migration from Rackspace to AWS - brought a database server online at AWS on par with the size of ours at Rackspace and did some testing (to try to simulate a real world scenario). Got distracted by some other projects for a few weeks and all of a sudden comes a bill from AWS for almost a grand - we "didn't even use it"

Fortunately, as a 1 time courtesy, they credited it back, but the boss was definitely not happy, haha.

Be very careful what you turn on and what size it is.

Rackspace, is a bit more clear on pricing IMO.

I think everybody forgets to shut down an instance or two, at least once.

Luckily, you can experiment a lot within the Free Tier, especially for tests and simulations.

Anyways, which size and what kind of database were you migrating? Have you tried Aurora yet?

MySQL RDS instance - don't remember the specific size, but large - multiple processors, high bandwidth, high disk. I was gonna put some automated load on it to show the boss performance would be comparable to our dedicated server at Rackspace, and just forgot to turn it off.

The boss is happy with Rackspace and regardless of price, options, features, etc... he doesn't want to leave. I can only do, what the boss allows me to do. I don't hate Rackspace, I use them for other projects, but their service has gone down in recent years IMO.

Well, AWS's costs have been constantly decreasing during the last years. I am actually quite impressed with the new RDS Aurora update, both as far as performance and pricing. Especially since migrating from MySQL is as complex as a configuration switch, with a 5x increase in performance!

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