Avoid horrendous AWS bills with unusd.cloud - AWS Toolkit

Introduction

In this section, the host introduces the episode and welcomes Victor Grenu to the show.

Welcoming Victor Grenu

• The episode is part of the AWS toolkit series by Claudonaut.

• The focus of the series is on independent developers building practical tools for working with AWS.

• Victor Grenu is an independent AWS architect and creator of the AWS security digest newsletter.

• He is also the builder of unused.cloud, a tool for sending alerts for inactive assets in your AWS accounts.

Motivation behind Unused.Cloud

In this section, Victor explains his motivation behind creating Unused.Cloud.

Personal Motivation

• Victor's main motivation was for personal AWS accounts.

• He was preparing for Adobe certifications and needed to test Adobe services by spinning up different assets on his account.

• At the end of each day, he forgot to turn off these resources, resulting in unexpected charges at the end of each month.

• His idea was to send daily notifications about what was running on his account, especially in different regions.

Setting Up Unused.Cloud

In this section, Victor guides Claudonaut through setting up Unused.Cloud.

Signing Up

• Claudonaut signs up by entering a username and email address and creating a password.

Filling Account ID and Scan Schedule Preferences

• The first step after signing up is filling in your AWS account ID on the top left corner. This information can be found in your AWS console.

• You can choose your preference regarding your scan schedule: daily, weekly, monthly or custom cron expression or notification channel. By default, it's by email but you can also enable Slack notifications if you want.

Adding Slack Notification Channel

• To add Slack notifications as a channel option, you need to create a webhook for a specific channel.

• You can do this by going to the Incoming Webhook Integration in Slack and copying the URL provided.

Deploying IAM Permission

• To deploy the IAM permission, there is a CloudFormation template available.

• The permission gives Unused.Cloud access to assume a role in your account with read-only permissions to list EC2 instances, volumes, and metadata.

• This is least privileged permissions from what Victor can tell.

Verifying IAM Permission

In this section, Claudonaut verifies that the IAM permission has been deployed successfully.

Verification

• After clicking on "Deploy," you leave the default values checked and click "Create Stack."

• It will bring up an EMR on your account. This usually takes a few minutes.

• To verify that the permission is called, click "Set."

AWS Unused Cloud Resources Monitoring

In this section, the speaker discusses how AWS Unused Cloud helps monitor unused resources in an AWS account and sends notifications via email and Slack channels.

Schedule-based Notification

• AWS Unused Cloud monitors unused resources in an AWS account.

• The service runs on a schedule and sends a summary notification every morning via email and Slack channels.

• The morning notification is helpful as it reminds users of unused resources that they may have forgotten about.

Resource Utilization Metrics

• AWS Unused Cloud provides metrics such as month-to-date spending, forecasted spend, CPU usage, and network packets to help track resource utilization.

• Users can anticipate any surge in their AWS bill by following these metrics.

• Unused EBS volumes and elastic IPs are also monitored to prevent unnecessary costs from piling up.

Email Reports

• In addition to Slack notifications, users receive weekly email reports with links to each resource for easy access.

• Users can jump directly to the target asset from the report by clicking on the link provided.

Custom Tags

• Custom tags can be added to the report for better organization of resources based on project or owner name.

Pricing Model

• The service is free forever for single address accounts.

Future Plans for Unused.Cloud

In this section, the speaker talks about the future plans for unused.cloud and what services they plan to add.

Adding More Services

• The speaker plans to add more serverless resources like containers and Lambda functions.

• They also plan to work on deploying multiple AWS accounts at once.

• Currently, unused.cloud supports RDS, EC2, EBS, Elastic IP, Dev Glue, Redshift Cluster and Sagemaker Notebooks.

Conclusion

In this section, the host concludes the interview by thanking Robert for sharing his product and providing links to unused.cloud.

• The host thanks Robert for bringing the product into existence and demoing it.

• The host encourages viewers to subscribe to their newsletter or podcast and provide feedback.

• The episode ends with a call-to-action asking viewers to support their work with a recurring donation.