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Comment by alexkon | Hacker News Reader

How do you approach a horrifying AWS bill? Can you recommend any reading? I’m going to need to optimize a tiny fleet on GCE pretty soon.

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It gets into the specifics of "what makes it horrifying" pretty quickly. It usually boils down to "nobody's responsible for cleaning things up," a misunderstanding of the billing model, and by the time anyone cares to fix it the billing report is multiple gigabytes.

Step 1 is always "figure out what you've got, and why it is this way."

So if the best way to avoid the mess is accountability for keeping things clean, how do you do that from the start? Would something as simple as tagging resources to specific teams/departments be a good place to start? I'm helping with setting up a completely new account/environment and I know once the buzzword fever passes and the annual costs are reviewed there will be frantic requests to cut down the bill. Getting ahead of that inevitability with a plan and some preparation will save us a headache.

Propagate tags to secondary resources, like EBS volumes. Separate out production from your dev environment-- preferably with a second AWS account with consolidated billing. Buy in to something like Terraform or CloudFormation for building the non-instance parts of your stack.

As you grow, start adding project tags to things. Automatically tag resources with the IAM user who creates them. Have an "untagged resources report" that goes out on a schedule.

Build with an eye towards "when someone freaks out in a year about the bill, what questions will they have, and how can I best position Future Me to answer them?"

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