--- title: "Mid-cycle billing changes are the stuff of FInance nightmares" id: "15002" type: "newsletter" slug: "mid-cycle-billing-changes-are-the-stuff-of-finance-nightmares" published_at: "2025-04-21T14:30:00+00:00" modified_at: "2025-04-21T14:30:00+00:00" url: "https://www.lastweekinaws.com/newsletter/mid-cycle-billing-changes-are-the-stuff-of-finance-nightmares/" markdown_url: "https://www.lastweekinaws.com/newsletter/mid-cycle-billing-changes-are-the-stuff-of-finance-nightmares.md" excerpt: "Good Morning! A few changes–including an inscrutable pricing change mid-month? Read on for more… From the Community I’m a sucker for a good EC2 Instance Storage Benchmark Visualization. Mike Monteiro once again writes beautifully in How to write with the..." --- About the Author Corey is the Chief Cloud Economist at Duckbill, where he specializes in helping companies improve their AWS bills by making them smaller and less horrifying. He also hosts the "Screaming in the Cloud" and "AWS Morning Brief" podcasts; and curates "Last Week in AWS," a weekly newsletter summarizing the latest in AWS news, blogs, and tools, sprinkled with snark and thoughtful analysis in roughly equal measure. Sign up for the Newsletter Stay up to date on the latest AWS news, opinions, and tools, all lovingly sprinkled with a bit of snark. "*" indicates required fields ## [Good Morning](https://bsky.app/profile/quinnypig.com/post/3lmud7dzooc2g) ! A few changes–including an inscrutable pricing change mid-month? Read on for more… ## From the Community I’m a sucker for a good [EC2 Instance Storage Benchmark Visualization](https://benjdd.com/ec2-io/) . Mike Monteiro once again writes beautifully in [How to write with the Devil’s hand](https://buttondown.com/monteiro/archive/how-to-write-with-the-devils-hand/) . Man, did the story ever resonate for me. A helpful reminder, now that Grok is generally available, to [Never Take a Dependency on Elon Musk](https://platformonomics.com/2025/04/never-take-a-dependency-on-elon-musk-grok-api-edition/) . They’re [winding down Common Fate](https://www.commonfate.io/blog/winding-down) , sadly–but they’re donating my beloved Granted.dev to fwd:CloudSec, so I know it’s in good hands. ## Podcasts Last Week In AWS: [Another New Capacity Dingus](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/aws-morning-brief/another-new-capacity-dingus/) Screaming in the Cloud: [Finding Engineers with Empathy with Lili Rogowsky](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/finding-engineers-with-empathy-with-lili-rogowsky/) ## Choice Cuts [AWS simplifies Amazon VPC Peering billing](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2025/04/amazon-vpc-peering-billing/) – Good change, except for the part where they made it "effective today" on April 11. Finance hates this sort of thing. This team at AWS likely has not spoken to customers lately, but that’s gonna change in a freaking hurry at month-end… [AWS now allows customers in Europe to pay For their usage in advance](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2025/04/aws-europe-pay-usage-advance/) – Now Europeans too can give Amazon a zero-interest loan for their future usage. What a bargain! [AWS Lambda@Edge announces advanced logging controls](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2025/04/aws-lambda-edge-advanced-logging-controls/) – AWS remembers it has a Lambda@Edge product after not touching it since dinosaurs roamed the earth. [Announcing new AWS Wavelength Zone in Dakar](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2025/04/aws-wavelength-zone-dakar/) – Sub-Saharan Africa doesn’t exactly get a lot of infrastructure investment from cloud providers so I’m curious what they think this is gonna accomplish. I’m eager to learn. [Announcing the AWS Well-Architected Generative AI Lens](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/announcing-the-aws-well-architected-generative-ai-lens/) – The first of six steps here is "scoping the impact of generative AI in solving your problem," which is where 95% of GenAI products should have died. [Announcing General Availability of GitLab Duo with Amazon Q](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/announcing-general-availability-of-gitlab-duo-with-amazon-q/) – AWS takes another tilt at "badging their first-party products with third parties," a practice whose track record has been… mixed. Curious to hear how folks like this. [Racing beyond DeepRacer: Debut of the AWS LLM League](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-learning/racing-beyond-deepracer-debut-of-the-aws-llm-league/) – This is missing what made DeepRacer great: so much of what we do as technologists distills down to "make the pattern of lights on the screen change." The DeepRacer aspect turned it into a toy car racing around a track–and this goes straight back to staring at the almighty screen instead. [Manage budgets efficiently with budget events in AWS Deadline Cloud](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/media/manage-budgets-efficiently-with-budget-events-in-aws-deadline-cloud/) – How come most of AWS’s products don’t have budget events like this? ## Tools [cloud-snitch](https://github.com/ccbrown/cloud-snitch) is a map visualizer for AWS activity. I’ll be playing with it this week… … and that’s what happened ***Last Week in AWS.*** ## You might also like [More Newsletter Issues](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/newsletter/) Issue No.468 ### [Multicloud Interconnect and the Great CVE Hunt](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/newsletter/multicloud-interconnect-and-the-great-cve-hunt/) [Read More about Multicloud Interconnect and the Great CVE Hunt](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/newsletter/multicloud-interconnect-and-the-great-cve-hunt/) Issue No.467 ### [S3 Files and an AI-Powered Singing Rat Trap](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/newsletter/s3-files-and-an-ai-powered-singing-rat-trap/) [Read More about S3 Files and an AI-Powered Singing Rat Trap](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/newsletter/s3-files-and-an-ai-powered-singing-rat-trap/) Issue No.466 ### [S3 Gets Vectors, CloudFront Gets SHA-256, You Get the Bill](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/newsletter/s3-gets-vectors-cloudfront-gets-sha-256-you-get-the-bill/) [Read More about S3 Gets Vectors, CloudFront Gets SHA-256, You Get the Bill](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/newsletter/s3-gets-vectors-cloudfront-gets-sha-256-you-get-the-bill/) Issue No.465 ### [Aurora PostgreSQL: Now Free Enough to Be Dangerous](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/newsletter/aurora-postgresql-now-free-enough-to-be-dangerous/) [Read More about Aurora PostgreSQL: Now Free Enough to Be Dangerous](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/newsletter/aurora-postgresql-now-free-enough-to-be-dangerous/)