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by tonfreed 1870 days ago
AWS is like a weapons cache you've stumbled upon in the middle of the desert, lots of fun, useful and interesting stuff in it but you're going to get yourself hurt if you don't take proper precautions.

This sounds like a cautionary tale. I have spending alarms on my personal account for this very reason, I'll know within 5-10 minutes if my monthly spend is going to break $50 because I've set up my alarms.

Your other option is to start a Cloudtrail and alarm on foreign IPs that are logging in, new IAM users and keys being created and changes to any alarms you have in place to check for this stuff. It won't necessarily stop it, but you'll be able to react a lot faster.
2 comments
thorin 1870 days ago
You'll have a notice within 5-10 minutes if you continually carry your phone and are "supporting" your application 24/7. What if you want to go camping or turn your phone off when you go to bed or do a long drive or something?
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usr1106 1869 days ago
I don't want 5-10 minutes necessarily.

But what would be best practices for billing alarms? I have used them in the past when I used a bit more of AWS, but I don't think I ever got one (which is good).

But it happens to me that I miss emails that I would have liked to read in time for weeks. That could happen with a billing alarm, too.

Maybe you could forward it to SNS with SMS delivery. But as a matter of fact SMS is one of the few services (if not the only one) with a spending limit. If that is reached you silently won't get SMSes anymore, I have experienced that.

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tonfreed 1870 days ago
No need to be facetious, friend. Were I a more paranoid man I'd hook a lambda into the SNS topic and terminate all ec2 instances, delete all S3 buckets, delete all IAM keys and regenerate and send me the root password.

I'm not that worried though.

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mattmanser 1869 days ago
There's nothing facetious about his post, you've over-reacted to it.
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isbvhodnvemrwvn 1870 days ago
Are you going to know it within 5-10m? Billing updates can take hours to appear on my account (I noticed that with some new services I was using). Even CloudTrail can take longer than 5-10m.
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