Ah yes you're at the fifth level of AWS cost management consciousness. You may have skipped the first four levels. First is the simple test case using somethin

Ah yes you're at the fifth level of AWS cost management consciousness. You may have skipped the first four levels. First is the simple test case using something random like Lambda and S3 after dragging through the Whizlabs course. This costs you $5 a month. Second is the migration of something not particularly complicated but a bit meatier which works out cheaper than your capital expenditure coming up so you can write it off without having to fill in a purchase order and argue with accounts again. Third is the overconfident architectural approach of multi-account, multi-AZ with peering all over the shop as recommended in the best practices, certification and architecture documentation. Approving nods all around on delivering this, despite the operational expenditure being slightly higher than predicted on your hacked up and not totally complete Excel spreadsheet for cost management. Fourth is the first bill. This immediately points out your inter-VPC, inter-AZ transit and shitty shared tenancy CPU provision you had to crank up quickly at the last minute, costs more a month than your entire infrastructure capex for 3 years did before you got AWS resulting in sad kitty faces all around and a scramble for a cheaper option while trying not to get fired. This is all while Bezos dances on the flames coming from the dollar bills he's burning in a giant bonfire cackling loudly. Fifth is several months later after being on the job market, eating ramen and searching for a company which "doesn't do any of that cloud stuff". You eventually find a position herding a couple of 1U supermicro boxes with CentOS on them which require the odd disk replacing here and there and some PHP updating without going near Terraform, Jenkins or any of that shit. Your entire infrastructure upgrade is automating your entire job into a few ansible playbooks and spending 6 hours a day inspecting the insides of your eyelids.