Real-World Lessons from the Field from Runaway Serverless Costs
"In mature environments, cloud engineers and operations teams play a critical role in driving efficiency and governance, not just in building new systems." - DJ' Kone.
Welcome back to the Fahmacloud Newsletter, where we share actionable insights on optimizing your AWS bill and boosting ROI with effective approaches.
Recently, we came across a post on Reddit where someone asked:
“How do you prevent runaway serverless costs?”
It’s a great question — and one that hits close to home for many teams managing large-scale AWS environments.
Now, imagine your CTO asks you to bring solutions to this exact problem. What would you do?
Before jumping into solutions, we want to share a short story from our experience that shaped how we think about cost management and cloud governance.
During one of our projects, we were tasked with solving three key challenges:
Enable access without overexposure: Allow contractor teams to download logs without granting full access to our AWS accounts.
Detect failures early: Build a system that alerts the infrastructure team when applications stop sending data to our landing zones.
Increase cost visibility: Create a daily health report that notifies the governance team about cost increases across services, without requiring them to log into AWS.
Through that experience, we learned that even in mature environments, cloud engineers and operations teams play a critical role in driving efficiency and governance, not just in building new systems.
If you’re starting your AWS journey, don’t stop at tutorials. Look for real-world problems to solve, even if they seem small.
Those challenges teach you how AWS behaves in real situations: how costs grow, how data flows and how governance works behind the scenes.
Because cloud engineering isn’t only about building. It’s also about improving, monitoring, and governing what already exists.
That’s it for this week’s Fahmacloud Newsletter.
If you found this useful, forward it to a teammate or peer managing AWS costs.
Have a question or topic you’d like us to cover in a future issue? Hit reply, we’d love to hear from you.