Find the charges nobody provisioned

short · 35 min · Objective 1.8

Task

Work through a bill -- yours, or one you construct from the provider's price list -- and separate the charges somebody deliberately provisioned from the ones that accumulated. The second category is where the recoverable money is.

Steps

  1. List every line item in lab/bill.csv with columns item,monthly_cost,provisioned_deliberately,how_it_would_be_found.
  2. Mark as NOT deliberate anything in the lesson's list: egress, inter-zone transfer, NAT processing, idle addresses, unattached volumes, orphaned snapshots, empty load balancers, log retention.
  3. Total both categories and express the accidental one as a percentage of the bill.
  4. For each accidental item, write the specific query or filter that would find it -- not 'check the console', but the resource state to filter on.
  5. Identify the single line item you would attack first, and justify it on effort against saving rather than on size alone.

Verify

awk -F, 'NR>1 && NF>=4 {n++} END {print n" line item(s)"}' lab/bill.csv
awk -F, 'NR>1 && $3 ~ /no|false/ {n++} END {print n" accidental item(s)"}' lab/bill.csv
grep -Eci 'egress|transfer' lab/bill.csv
grep -Eci 'unattached|available|idle' lab/bill.csv

At least four accidental items, and both egress and an idle-resource category must appear. A bill with no accidental charges has not been read carefully enough.

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