Just had a scare this morning when I was checking my email. Apparently, I racked up a bill on AWS last night. At first, I thought I was hacked and someone was using my account for bitcoin mining or something similarly costly. But after a call with AWS, it turns out it was my own doing.
When using both ELB (Elastic Load Balancer) and ASG (Auto Scaling Group), these services by default draw their IPv4 addresses from the VPC (Virtual Private Cloud). Unlike EC2 instances, the VPC is not free, so I was racking up charges for all the public IPv4 addresses I was using, even if they were not active.
The amount I had to pay was insignificant, only $0.02, but it was only that way because I terminated both my load balancer and my auto scaling group after I finish messing with them. This experience showed me that if you're messing with AWS, be careful about what you play with and what you leave running. You might find yourself with a bill in the hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars if you're careless enough.
Stay vigilant, folks!
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