The Bill Nobody Expected

Last quarter, a Dubai-based SaaS company we work with opened its AWS bill to find it had jumped from AED 68,000 to AED 96,000. No new product launch. No traffic spike. Just drift.

When we dug in, here's what we found: an EC2 fleet in eu-west-1 that the DevOps team had forgotten after a client demo three months earlier. An RDS instance for a decommissioned analytics pipeline is still running at full capacity. Several unattached Elastic IPs. And not a single resource tagged with an owner or cost centre.

Nobody had done anything malicious. The team was just moving fast, and the environment had grown faster than their ability to see it. That's the governance gap. And it shows up in AWS bills across the UAE every single month.

This guide walks you through fixing it.…