While studying for the SA-Pro test, I reacquainted myself with AWS Config. This is a great tool, helps you track changes to your environment, monitor policy compliance, all but butters your bread. So, I'm nosing around, walking my way through the console, setting up the bucket and the recording, I figure I'll add some rules. There are 21 rules, so I figure what the heck, throw 'em all in, I'll sort them out later.

A little warning went off in my head, I think I made this mistake before... Yep, this will be a $42 dollar mistake. At this point, it is $2 per month per active rule. So, there goes any savings I was shooting for this month, with my $100 credit for answering a survey. Sorry, taxpayers, my bad. I'll get it back once I figure out how to shrink these root EBS volumes...

Why do the warnings come after the spells...?

However, as part of my daily billing review I see the system only charged me for rules that applied to my resources after I ripped them all out, so I only got hit with 9 rules for $18, plus some change for 39 evaluations.

The cool thing is the Dashboard that gives me a chance to drill down into all my resources. After two years of experimentation and implementation, I'm up to 127 cosas! (Sorry, bing-watched Narcos, my Spanish has gotten more colorful). Didn't think that I had 14 network interfaces up, I only have 4 EC2 instances. Good place to do some exploration.

When you View All # Resources, you get a list of each resource with a timeline of changes and a link to manage that resource, so you can zero in on each thing and make sure it is needed, properly configured, tagged, etc.

Very useful!