Cloud is cheap only if you are pedantic about costs. A slight oversight without sufficient controls may end up in a huge bill. My AWS free-tier came to an end in July, August came with a huge lesson.
Free-tier is meant for learning, so I set up my WordPress application attempting to follow the well-architected framework. Looking back now I did not need an ELB because I did not need or foresee a traffic surge on the blog. But August came bearing gifts
Looking at the above, you can tell I am not running a lot of resources but to have a load-balancer contribute more than 50% is absurd. Why did I use an ELB?
How it went wrong?
I wanted to enable HTTPS on my blog. So I did a quick search and found one using ELB + AWS Certificate Manager. This was the first solution I came across. My first mistake was not looking up pricing for these resources to estimate monthly costs to see if I could afford it. AWS has a pricing page for each resource. For ELB it is available here. Secondly, not looking to see if there are cheaper solutions. I was also lazy because I was on free-tier, so it was for “Free”.
How I fixed it?
$17 might not be a lot for many people but for me, it is huge. As soon as I saw the bill, I deleted the ELB straight away. Left my blog with HTTPS disabled for almost a week. During this time I did my homework looking for alternative cheaper solutions. I am using the Bitnami AMI to host the blog, and it turns out I did not even have to buy an SSL certificate[another unnecessary spend]. Following the instructions here, I could configure a free auto-renew LetsEncrpyt certificate with one script and a few prompts. I know, it’s embarrassing. I call it “school fees” and I am sure some have paid more.
What did I learn?
Be pedantic about costs. I have created budgets and alerts to make sure this does not happen again or happens as early as possible to afford to correct it in time. In-fact budgets should be the first thing you set up before you launch any resources just in case you fall asleep on the wheel as I did. Like always thank you for reading. Please do share your stories with me as well. Tweet me @siyamchunu
Originally published at loggedon.co.za on August 31, 2020.