Hey everyone! I'm diving into a small case study to figure out what typically leads to those shocking cloud service bills. I'd love to hear your worst experiences — what caused them? Was it a mistake on your part or someone else's? After receiving such unexpected costs, how do you handle it? Have you implemented any measures to prevent this from happening again?
5 Answers
Had a huge mishap with Amazon Connect after a miscalculation during migration. Our Webex bill shot from $90k to $280k a month. We’ve definitely scaled things back since then and are way more careful about the services we add!
A co-worker once accidentally pushed an AWS root key to a public GitHub repo, and within minutes, we had thousands of GPU instances running for crypto mining! We shut everything down and managed to get Amazon to refund us, but it was a nightmare. On a side note, monitoring tools like Datadog can get super pricey, especially with logging — my last place had over 30 billion log entries in a month and the bill was insane!
I've had a similar scare. I messed up some restricted credentials and AWS blocked them almost immediately. Thank goodness!
As a student experimenting with AWS, my biggest blunder was forgetting to terminate a NAT gateway. Those things can really drain your wallet without a peep!
Same! NAT gateways are like silent money thieves! Now I keep a check-list to destroy unused resources daily.
Wow, I once ran this massive query in BigTable that took ages to complete. The database was huge but the bill was even bigger afterward! Now I’m more cautious about monitoring compute during queries to avoid surprises like that. Got to keep those costs in check!
What do you do now to monitor costs? Set up any guardrails to help?
Honestly, just reach out to support if things go haywire. From my time in Azure billing support, I’ve seen refund requests from a few bucks to thousands due to unexpected charges. The key is to be transparent with them about your situation — and make sure to complete their surveys! They really do help the support staff improve!
How often did you get those strange requests? Any common mistakes that popped up?
How does that even slip past PR reviews? That sounds wild!