Introduction
Amazon Web Services is a really big place. Each account has access to more than 100 distinct services, which can each be deployed in hundreds or even thousands of permutations. Anyone with the right account credentials can—legitimately or otherwise—launch new service instances without anyone else knowing. For the most part, resources running within one AWS Region will be invisible to you when you’ve got any one of the nearly 20 other regions selected in your console.
With all that going on all the time, there are going to be two account-level things you want to be clear about:
- What’s it all going to cost you? Because cloud services are scalable, there’s virtually no limit to how much of them you can purchase, or to how much they can cost you. If something isn’t going according to plan, you’ll want to know what it is and how to pull its plug as soon as possible.
- Who’s running the show? In other words, who has the authority...
