>Furthermore, AWS billing is uncapped, which has significant potential for trouble.
Two words: billing alarms. If you have stuff on AWS, and you don't have billing alarms for actual and predicted costs, you have nobody to blame but yourself for extra charges.
EDIT>> I see they address billing alarms but claim that they only fire after you've lost the money. This is simply not true with the predictive alarms. I get the sense that this author is not using AWS correctly in general.
I'm a big advocate of AWS, but there are some unexpected billing items e.g. moving data between AZs in the same region. Yes it's all documented and you may be able to be work around many items, but you really need to get into the weeds to cut costs.
When I was initially perusing AWS at my current company I was able to save us a ton of (recurring) money simply by properly deleting EBS volumes of terminated machines... someone didn't check a checkbox at some point (and/or didn't understand its significance): oopsie.
It's hard to set alarms early on when you're building stuff out. In any case I think it really needs to be someone's role to understand the billing thoroughly, somewhat regularly. Our billing line items post daily to me on slack, mostly I'll just check the total vs the previous week, and cloudability sends email alarms for specific things and suggests RIs etc.
But if traffic is high in the beginning of the month does this mean you should be allocated more budget? How much? Such an alarm doesn't really give you any insight into where the additional costs might be, or where/whether it's worth spending engineering time optimizing!
If you don't have a budget, then that's what you should establish first. If you can't get a handle on your budget, then no set of tools and techniques is going to save you.
The point is that the budget changes all the time for anything other than a simple application stack. If you're constantly experimenting and building new applications, you basically need to quickly glance at your daily usage to make sure you won't get a surprise in 30 days.
I've never worked at a company where the cloud budget fluctuated in the way that you are describing, and we certainly didn't run "simple application stacks." Costs and usage patterns are predictable. If you want to do whatever you want, costs be damned, then I'd ask why you're even bothering to be alerted about costs in the first place.
Two words: billing alarms. If you have stuff on AWS, and you don't have billing alarms for actual and predicted costs, you have nobody to blame but yourself for extra charges.
EDIT>> I see they address billing alarms but claim that they only fire after you've lost the money. This is simply not true with the predictive alarms. I get the sense that this author is not using AWS correctly in general.