Prevent Charges by Monitoring Your Usage

When learning how to use “The Cloud”, unexpected charges are a right of passage, even using the “Free Tier”. We have experienced this ourselves and we’ve seen it happen to most of our students. In this article we are going to help enlightened newcomers avoid paying for their mistakes.

Why is this an issue?

You would think that “Free Tier” means you will not pay money. This isn’t the case. By design, the cloud allows you consume any amount of resources that you request. The dark side of this, is if you request more than your free allotment, you will pay for it. The Free Tier only stays free if you stay under the usage limits that AWS lays out for you. If you exceed these limits, you will be charged according to their billing schedule.

The justification of this is CapEx vs OpEx. The whole point of the cloud is that you get what you ask for. If you want to consume more resources that you are given for free, you are able to do so, but you will be charged.

However, there should at least be the option to let you kill all services once you hit the free tier limit to prevent any charges. This is a feature that users have been asking for over a decade.

Before you plunge into AWS, you need to understand key billing concepts and construct a safety net.

#aws #software-development #free tier