A billing gotcha with AWS Workspaces and Directory Service

[This is a repost from my old Weblog - original publication date 2022-07-17.]

My personal Amazon AWS bill has been unusually high for the past few months, so I broke open the cost explorer to see where the money was going.

AWS costs

Almost of it was expected - EC2 instances, domain registration and renewal, and so forth. Some was due to laziness (hadn't gotten around to purchasing reserved instances for my EC2-based servers).

But one of the costs was completely *unexpected*: a Directory Service cost that appeared in November 2020, and has totalled AUD281.77 since then.

A quick online chat with AWS support provided the explanation: when I created an AWS Workspace back in 2019, a Directory Service resource - a Directory - was automagically created for me. That Directory was free as long as I had a Workspace.

However in November 2020, I deleted the Workspace. That did *not* destroy the Directory, at which point I started being charged for it, to the tune of around AUD35 per month.

Amazon is being very good about it, and winding back *all* of the Directory Service charges since 2020. It's reassuring to know that I'm not being billed for what I see as a UX bug :)

But this is an anti-pattern I haven't seen until now: *destroying* a resource caused me to *start* being billed for another. Something to keep an eye open for in the future :)

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