FWIW, I wasn't trying to be critical. Or, at least, I was trying to be constructively critical. Getting to a Terraform setup is an excellent start...lots of com

FWIW, I wasn't trying to be critical. Or, at least, I was trying to be constructively critical. Getting to a Terraform setup is an excellent start...lots of companies can't get that far. I guess I'd just encourage you to view it as the beginning of a longer process that allows you to take full advantage of the fact that AWS bills by the hour and lets you launch as much infrastructure as you want. Always-on non-production environments are, to my mind, a vestige of the time where you had physical servers that needed to be provisioned by a person and cost roughly the same amount when switched off. Or at least the time where OPS built and maintained each AWS VM by hand. On-demand just offers so much more flexibility...stuff like the example from my response to a sibling comment--you should be able to type a single command and spin up an environment from a pull request any time a code reviewer wants to do testing to ensure that what code looks like it does is what it actually does. The more you can leverage the work you've done to get to where you are, the more you can drive down your AWS costs while giving greater flexibility and isolation to your non-prod workload.