Ask HN: How do you monitor your AWS costs?
With the increasing usage of automation it's getting more and more easy to deploy a lot of cloud resources and the cost attach to it increase as well. So I wonder how do you keep track of it ?
"How much will this cost" should not be calculated as an afterthought, but rather from the beginning, at the same time you're answering all other architectural questions.
If you've calculated the cost from the beginning, you may as well track costs in your monitoring code and metrics system. For example if you've had 10 VMs running the last hour, log the price of them to your metrics system. Then you can graph prices along with any other metric and see how bottlenecks drive cost.
Try to anticipate the bottlenecks of your system, and see if there's an easy way to avoid AWS for those components. That is, if you're an image host, you probably don't want to pay per GB of bandwidth at AWS when you can pay per capacity at any dedicated/colo provider.