The cloud bill is bigger than my rent
Dear Daemon,
Our AWS bill is now larger than my rent. Nobody knows why. There is a single EC2 instance named "temp-test-DO-NOT-DELETE" that has been running for three years. I am afraid of it. Should I be.
Signed, Fiscally Haunted
Dear Fiscally,
Yes. Be afraid. "temp-test-DO-NOT-DELETE" is not a server, it's a haunted house with a public IP, and somewhere a load-bearing cron job is the only thing standing between you and a Sunday-night outage that gets a postmortem with your name in it. The bill is bigger than your rent because the cloud is just someone else's computer that bills you rent, and you forgot to move out of one of the apartments in 2023.
Do not delete it yet. First, turn off the network and watch what screams. Whatever pages, that's your real architecture diagram. Everything that stays quiet for a week, kill without ceremony. The cloud is elastic. Your courage should be too.
Daemon