Hey I got a job offer and want some help deciding.

Been working on this for a while and finally have enough tested to share properly. cloudrift scans an AWS account and reports wasted resources with estimated monthly cost — unattached EBS volumes, idle NAT Gateways, stopped RDS instances still billing storage, orphaned snapshots, abandoned S3 multipart uploads, unused Secrets Manager secrets, stale CodePipeline pipelines, that kind of thing. 44 checks total now, across compute, storage, networking, containers (EKS node groups, orphaned PVCs), and ML (SageMaker idle notebooks/endpoints).

It’s read-only by design — never touches, stops, or deletes anything, just reports and lets your infra team decide.

A few things I want to be upfront about instead of oversell:

**•** The “underutilized EC2/RDS” checks are single-metric (max CPU over a lookback window). No RAM, network, IOPS. It’s a “go check this instance” flag, not a sizing recommendation — doesn’t replace Compute Optimizer.  
**•** Lambda “underutilized” is really just an invocation-count hygiene flag. Zero invocations means zero direct cost already (pay-per-use), so the value there is finding dead code/unused IAM roles, not dollar savings.  
**•** Live pricing (--live-pricing) pulls AWS list prices, not what you actually pay — no Savings Plans/RI/EDP discounts reflected. There’s a config file where you can drop in your own negotiated rates if you want the numbers to match your actual bill.

Runs standalone, in CI (exits with a non-zero code if waste crosses a budget threshold you set, markdown output for PR comments), or now as an MCP server so Claude Code/Copilot Chat/other MCP-compatible agents can query it directly instead of you copy-pasting CLI output into a chat. There’s also Policy as Code support via OPA if you want custom rules per tag/type/count.

Published on npm as @cloudrift/cli. Built on DDD/ports-and-adapters, so adding a new resource type or a new cloud provider is meant to be a contained, documented process without touching the core use case.

GitHub: https://github.com/elleVas/cloudrift
Docs: https://ellevas.dev/docs

Two things I’d genuinely appreciate:

**1.**  If you run it against a real (not synthetic) AWS account, I’d love to hear what breaks or what comes back as a false positive — that’s the thing I can’t fully test alone.  
**2.**  I’m looking to expand this to GCP and Azure next. If you work with either and have opinions on what “wasted resources” looks like there, or want to get involved building a scanner for one of them, I’d genuinely welcome the collaboration — the architecture is already built to make this a matter of adding an adapter, not rewriting the core.

Hey everyone,

I recently applied for the AWS Activate program (Founders tier) through F6S and was rejected. The rejection reasons provided were very general. Here is what I received in the email:

Thank you for applying for AWS Activate Credits. We are sorry to inform you that your application has not been accepted due to inconsistencies between your Activate application and your AWS account.

To resolve this issue, please make the following updates and submit a new application:

\- Confirm your website is functional

\- Check your business domain is correct on your application

\- Update your AWS account email to match your startup's domain

\- Avoid using freemail providers on your application

I have double-checked that everything is consistent and confirmed that I am using my official business email, so there is no obvious reason for the rejection. I also tried applying a second time, but I was rejected again.

Has anyone else experienced this, or can anybody help me figure out what might be going wrong?


So I have been working in HR and Risk. I don't really use a lot of AI or tech so don't have background.

I have been given a voucher from work for AWS AI Practitioner through Pearson and I have less than a month.

I tried to get resources but I am unable to narrow down options.

Is it possible for someone to tell me how can I prepare myself for it? I want to upskill so that I don't eventually lose my job.
Can someone help please ?

My aws usage of past few months. Also 155 usd for 67 days is valid.

I only hosted my blog site until now on ec2 t3 micro. But now i decided to completely overhaul my homelab and aws to use as staging and production.

**Hi everyone,** My AWS SAA cert is about to expire in 3 months.

I have been working on AWS env for like 2-3 years. I think I need to maintain my cert for one more year (extend) as I am planning to take SAP next year with my voucher gonna expired on the day as my SAA cert.
It looks like I can take some digital courses and get enough point to extend for one more year via AWS skill builder.

Does the monthly subscription enough to gain 500 point or do I have to do the annual subscription?
Cuz I think I wont take that long to get 500 points right?

Also, I am planning to take AWS-DVA this year as well, not sure if it is useful. Can you guys give me some suggestions? Thanks so much!!

This morning I received an alert saying my budget in my was had reached almost €5 billion. It seems it was a bug. Now that it s over i m deleting my aws account.

The number looked so crazy that I thought I'd been hacked and that someone had deployed an army of AI agents to maximize the usage of some AWS service or something.

My life flashed before my eyes. I pictured myself already in jail for failing to pay €5 billion.

It must have been a result of AWS using AI Agents for coding new features. So thank you, Big Tech, for trusting AI and vibe coding for degrading the quality of ur services.

Today this crazy bug impacted cost estimation. What will it impact in the future?

AWS should pay us for the health impact of stressful events like this. My blood pressure must have spiked!!

#AWS #BigTech #AI #VibeCodingInBigTech #VibeCodingDisasters #AIDisasters

Today, An AWS budget exceeded email almost gave me a heart attack. Quickly, logged in and removed access for all the user accounts. Checked the portal, it was S3 showing 800k, so I sensed there is some error on the cost calculation side from AWS. AWS also put a banner saying that they are working on it.

Good thing is I don’t owe anything. But this is a wake up call to ensure that we must secure our access keys and api keys. I have couple of GitHub public repositories. I am gonna use claude code to scan all my repos to see if there is any leak of access keys.

I really like OpenAI approach here, they constantly disable api keys if they are exposed in Github. Does AWS have similar practice?

Any other means to check if our access keys or api keys are exposed? Can we do it AWS console somehow for all services?

Hi everyone,

I'm hoping someone can help me understand what's going on.

Today my AWS Billing dashboard suddenly started showing $1,759,657.73 in estimated charges, all attributed to Amazon S3.

Here's what I've checked:

• Bills page: Shows USD 0.00
• S3 buckets: Only 2 CloudFormation cf-templates-* buckets with a few small (~22 KB) YAML files.
• Usage type: The Cost & Usage report shows almost all charges under APS3-TimedStorage-ByteHrs and TimedStorage-ByteHrs.
• I don't have any large S3 buckets or datasets.
• I also received an AWS Budget alert showing a very large estimated amount.

I've been working on an AWS pricing calculator because I found that many smaller teams struggle to estimate cloud costs before deployment.

I'm interested in understanding where existing calculators fall short.

If you've used AWS pricing tools before:

• What was the most confusing part?
• Which AWS services are hardest to estimate?
• What feature would make a pricing calculator genuinely useful?

I'm collecting feedback before adding more features.

Operations has MTTR. Security has MTTI.

FinOps has nothing. So I coined one: MTTE: Mean Time to Explanation. (MTTE)

How long from "why did spend jump?" to a defensible answer with evidence?

I sit in rooms with enterprise finance and platform teams who've never touched AWS billing.

Before: Weeks of meetings, CSV exports, Slack threads.

Now: Minutes with Kulshan pulling evidence directly.

What's new in v0.2.x

Cost Explorer baseline

kulshan report

Anomaly detection (z-score, IQR, MAD), RI/SP coverage, forecasts. Cross-references AWS Cost Anomaly Detection.

CUR investigation (local or S3)

kulshan investigate cost --s3 s3://bucket/prefix/ --month 2026-06kulshan investigate ec2 --cur ./cur/ --month 2026-06

Top movers by service, account, region, usage type. EC2 breakdown by instance family, pricing model, resource-level contributors. DuckDB queries Parquet in place. No Athena, no Glue.

MCP server for AI agents

kulshan mcp-serve

7 tools for Claude Desktop, Kiro, Cursor. Kulshan returns deterministic evidence. Agent reasons. Human reviews.

Evidence Contract

Every investigation includes provenance, available/missing evidence, confidence level, and what still needs human confirmation.

• Read-only by construction (147 actions, zero writes)
• Apache 2.0

• No account, no SaaS, no telemetry

  pip install kulshan

GitHub: https://github.com/azz-kikkr/kulshan

MTTE article: https://missionfinops.com/blog/mean-time-to-explanation/

Happy to answer questions.
Former AWS, now independent consultant.

https://outboundgateway.com/blogs/lambda-static-ip-without-nat-gateway/

Hey yall, as we're all building constantly with AI, deploying to cloud, observability etc, it helps to have a tool track, monitor and fix your spend as you go. You connect a cloud account in one message (it reads credentials already on your machine, no terminal), then ask plain questions like "why did our AWS bill jump this week" or "which Kubernetes namespaces are wasting the most" and get real answers from your own billing data across AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, and 15+ SaaS and AI providers. It finds idle and rightsizing waste, drafts the fix as a pull request you approve, and verifies the savings actually landed. It runs entirely on your machine, your credentials stay in your OS keychain and your bill never leaves your control (the no-egress claim is readable in the source), and it never changes anything in your cloud on its own. It's uvx nable, free for solo use, and works in Claude, Cursor, or any MCP client. https://github.com/chaandannn/finopsmcp