In the past, we were using the VPN solution from AWS, and even though the per-hour cost seems cheap, the truth is the costs scale quickly when the whole team needs to be connected. We were a small team.
At some point, I was investigating a spike in billing, and I marked moving from the AWS VPN solution to OpenVPN as a possible improvement.
AWS VPN costs:
At some point in 2023, we were discussing costs and pagespeed. I quickly pointed out that the slow performance and spike in bandwidth costs were caused by the usage of .gif images. At first, the team was reluctant, but a few days later, I came up with a report provided by the Amazon S3 service, where you can save an access log of the hosted files and later process it using Amazon Athena.
One day, pretty early in the morning, I got a message with a screenshot from the CTO saying:
Any thoughts on how we keep these cleaned up?
A few months earlier, we were discussing the need to deploy feature branch environments as a solution to avoid our delivery process getting stuck, as we were deploying more than the QA team could handle. We created a feature branch deployment pipeline, and it was working great, as every important feature was tested in isolation from the QA environment (no merges until approved by QA). Essentially, we stopped having complaints about our queue to production getting stuck due to defective code or incomplete acceptance criteria.
Late in 2023, AWS informed us that our Aurora servers needed to be migrated due to the deprecation of MySQL Community major version 5.7, recommending a migration to major version 8.0.
[!cite] AWS Announcement
[!note] Check how companies are unaware of these costs and how this could be impacting your billing: AWS Billing spike due to RDS Extended Support
That day during our stand-up meeting, the Scrum Master and the CTO assigned me the task of evaluating the impact of this notification. I immediately raised my concern about the costs the company would incur if we didn’t meet the deadline. Initially, it didn’t seem like much - $0.1 per VCPU -, so I decided to invest that day in compiling all the numbers to ensure everyone understood the impact of this notification.
You might be wondering why your AWS expenses for RDS shoot up in the last few months or maybe you already know this is caused by the Amazon RDS Extended Support for Aurora and want to migrate your engine version, if so this post is for you.
Late in 2023, AWS informed Aurora users to migrate the version of the Aurora engines due to the deprecation of the MySQL Community major version 5.7 and it was recommended to migrate to major version 8.0.