I was in my first year of uni, I was coding an online multiplayer game in C++ and I wanted to test play with one of my friends mostly for shits and giggles to s

I was in my first year of uni, I was coding an online multiplayer game in C++ and I wanted to test play with one of my friends mostly for shits and giggles to see how badly it would break. I had deployed basic websites / servers with more managed platforms before, but I needed? more control to be able to host the C++ server. So I found GCP, created a docker image, and got the server up and running somehow. We played for maybe 10 minutes before we ran out of stuff to do, and stopped playing. What I didn't realise at the time was that auto-scaling was a concept. I thought when there was no traffic then the server wouldn't work, and I forgot I ever deployed it. Anyways, a month later I got a $400 bill, not nearly as much as some people have lost but for a broke college student it was a lot - especially considering I only used it for 10 minutes.