Amazon Web Services and a Salutary Learning Experience

I received a small but costly reminder that little in life is free this AM.

Whilst indulging in my usual bout of cross-trainer ( #GymOClock ), I checked my emails and saw one purportedly from Amazon Web Services (AWS), suggesting that I owed them $56.31.

Being a cautious type, I did NOT click on the links in the email, but instead logged into my AWS dashboard: -

https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2

and navigated across to the Billing Dashboard: -

https://console.aws.amazon.com/billing/home

Lo and behold, there was a pukka invoice for October 2017, detailing the costs: -

I'd spun up a pair of RHEL VMs in early October, along with a HTTPS load balancer, in order to replicate a client's environment.

And then semi-forgotten about them ….

To be fair, I did have problems logging back into AWS, due to verification emails not getting through someone's spam filters, but …..

I forgot.

I've since shut down the VMs, so November's bill shouldn't be quite so high :-)

The moral of the story, nothing is free in life - apart from air :-)