Hey everyone! I'm diving into a case study about cloud billing and I'm curious to hear about any horror stories you might have. What's the worst bill you've ever gotten from a cloud service? What do you think triggered those huge charges? Was it a mistake on your part, a security issue, or something else? Plus, how did you handle the situation afterward? Did you implement any measures to prevent it from happening again?
4 Answers
Another common issue is leaving AWS resources running unnecessarily. I once forgot about an S3 bucket with versioning enabled. It turned out to be a costly mistake that saved us $6,000 once we discovered it! Always do a regular audit of your resources; it's easy to overlook what you don't see on your dashboard.
I can't stress enough how important it is to set up billing alerts. I had a client who forgot to shut down some GPU instances they turned on for testing. The bill ended up exceeding $20,000! If only they had alerts and better cost control in place. It’s essential to have multiple alerts for all team members, really helps in avoiding those shock bills.
Yes! I had a similar situation where one alert went unnoticed, leading us to a $100k bill. We learned the hard way to have more redundancy on those alerts.
Lambda function loops are like a classic horror story! You can trigger yourself into an infinite loop which can lead to insane costs. I had a client rack up $100k in a single day because their function was repeatedly invoking itself for hours. Definitely a lesson learned about setting up monitoring and limits on triggers!
Yikes, that’s wild! I’ve seen similar. It’s amazing how quickly these things can spiral out of control without proper checks.
Honestly, most of the nightmare bills I've seen come from security breaches. Small companies often rush to set up AWS accounts without proper security measures, leading to hacked accounts. Once, I saw a case where a user's account got compromised and a GPU miner was spun up, racking up the charges. It shows how crucial it is to implement MFA and security hygiene right from the start!
Totally agree! A friend of mine had the same issue, and it was a huge wake-up call about account security.
So true! Regular auditing makes a massive difference. I caught a few idle instances costing $300/month easily by checking more frequently.