AWS - Set alerts for expiring reserved instances!

This is a short post. Today I received a shocked bill from AWS where my bill was increase by almost 50%.

I know my resource consumption haven’t changed so I was initially shocked by what was causing this!

After about 5-10 minutes of clicking around, I remembered I’ve paid for 2x Reserve Instances (RI) awhile ago and thought this might be the case and it was!

My RI expired but AWS didn’t notify me by default. After a quick Google search, we actually have to enable the notification manually, so I recommend everyone to do this ASAP if you have purchased any RI for your AWS accounts or for your AWS Organisations.

To do this, go to AWS Cost Management > Overview > Manage alert subscriptions.

Set your alert frequency and email recipient and click save

Hopefully next time I will be reminded to renew the RI before it expires and get hit with another surprised bill.