Are You Wasting 70% of Your AWS Budget on Non-Prod Instances?

1. The Voluntary Cloud Tax Watching an AWS bill speedrun your IT budget is pure panic. Stop paying the voluntary cloud tax for dev servers that nobody turned off on Friday. 2. The Idle Math Let's look at the math: there are 168 hours in a week, and your developers are allegedly working 40 of them. That means for almost 130 hours a week, your non-production servers are just sitting there. They are active for maybe a quarter of the time. The other 76%, they're completely idle, doing absolutely nothing, just quietly burning company cash in a data center somewhere. 3. The Baseline Architecture Here is a baseline setup: we've got a standard Application Load Balancer sitting in front of an Auto Scaling Group with three T3 mediums. If we run a cost breakdown right now, it wants to charge us $108 a month. For a development server, that's a bit too much. Here is the complete Terraform configuration used to provision the baseline architecture, including the Launch Template, Auto Scaling Group, a