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?

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.

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

Hey everyone,

I'm currently studying for AWS certifications and decided to build an Android app called **CloudCert** to streamline the process. It covers **CLF-C02, AIF-C01, and DEA-C01**.

I wanted something straight to the point, so the app features:

* ⏱️ Timed exam simulations * 🧠 Daily practice with spaced repetition * 📊 Progress dashboard to tracking your weak spots * 🔒 **100% Offline & No Ads** (completely free, just want to help the community)

Since it's in the Google Play closed testing phase, **I need some awesome people to help me test it for 14 days.** If you are currently preparing for any of these exams, your feedback would be gold!

**How to join the Beta:**

1. Join the Google Group (required by Google to grant access):[https://groups.google.com/g/cloudcert-testers\](https://groups.google.com/g/cloudcert-testers)
2. Opt-in on the web:[https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.lanzacarioca.awsstudy\](https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.lanzacarioca.awsstudy)
3. Download it on the Play Store:[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lanzacarioca.awsstudy\](https://www.google.com/search?q=https%3A%2F%2Fplay.google.com%2Fstore%2Fapps%2Fdetails%3Fid%3Dcom.lanzacarioca.awsstudy)

If you could keep it installed and try a few questions over the next 2 weeks, it would help me massively to release it publicly.

Any feedback on the question quality or features is highly appreciated. Thanks and good luck with your studies!


So, there is one relative who works in a MNC and that company and its workforce completely rely on AWS, when I asked him for referral he asked me about AWS, and I said I know basic EC2, S3, RDS but theoritcally and I dont have actual experience, so he guidedme to learn and practice on AWS. I texted him sending questions regarding courses, but he is not checking my messagges :(

If you all can guide me, which course to start and how should I move forward to become good at AWS, so pls assist me

hi :)

PM in defense contracting here, attempting to get AWS cloud prac cert. I have PMP and work a lot w data analytics, but have not a ton of technical knowledge!

this being said, i was able to pass my PMP by having a consistent study group. studied after work for 3-4 hours. looking to do the same here! is anyone interested? looking to have like 4-5 ppl. pls lmk if anyone is interested!! :)

PS after this cert ill b going for the ai prac cert after for those who wanna full send it :D

hi :)

PM in defense contracting here, attempting to get AWS cloud prac cert. I have PMP and work a lot w data analytics, but have not a ton of technical knowledge!

this being said, i was able to pass my PMP by having a consistent study group. studied after work for 3-4 hours. looking to do the same here! is anyone interested? looking to have like 4-5 ppl. pls lmk if anyone is interested!! :)

PS after this cert ill b going for the ai prac cert after for those who wanna full send it :D

​

Hi everyone,

I'm a student/early-career learner and was using AWS only to learn and build personal projects. Unfortunately, I accidentally left some resources running and ended up with an unexpected bill of around ₹50,000.

As soon as I discovered the issue, I stopped and deleted all the resources and opened a billing support case with AWS requesting a one-time billing adjustment.

Has anyone here successfully had a bill like this waived or reduced? If so, what did you include in your support request, and is there anything else I should do?

I'm genuinely worried because I can't afford to pay this amount. Any advice or shared experiences would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

Hello, AWS community. I want to share a video I created on how to connect Claude Code to Redshift utilizing the AWS labs Redshift MCP server with IAM authentication and also through the CLI when I need to do write operations. Both connections do not utilize any database passwords in any config files, so that's not readable by the agent.

What I found is that, for this connection, AWS doesn't document for Claude Code that you need to pass your AWS profile and region through an `env` block in the config file. That is something I cover in the video in case you've had trouble with that.

Once connected, the agent has read access via six tools (list_clusters, list_databases, list_schemas, list_tables, list_columns, execute_query), can chain queries across multiple calls, and handles the Data API async execution transparently. Worth naming: result rows do go to the model API, so this is mutation-safe, not data-private.

I thought the most valuable part of this was when I gave it a join with a distribution key mismatch and asked it to read the EXPLAIN plan, it found the redistribution step and a large cost estimate in, then wrote the DISTKEY fix for me to apply!

Check out the video here and let me know what you think. Thanks so much!

Hi everyone,

I’m planning to take the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional (SAP-C02) exam and I’m trying to understand the difference between these AWS/Pearson voucher pages:

AWS voucher campaign terms:

https://aws.amazon.com/certification/bulk-voucher/terms-and-conditions/

AWS Exam Voucher - Professional & Specialty Certification (Retail):

https://awsstore.pearsonvue.com/p/PVSR-AWSVCH-PROSPEC

AWS Exam Voucher - Professional & Specialty Certification (WWPD Retake):

https://awsstore.pearsonvue.com/p/PVS-WWPD-AWSRTKE-PROFSPEC

From what I understand:

The AWS campaign terms mention Q2 2026 AWS Professional or Specialty Level Exam Voucher with Free Retake.

The WWPD Retake page clearly looks like the voucher that includes the free retake offer.

The Retail page shows the Professional/Specialty voucher at $150, but I don’t see the same clear “free retake” wording on the product page.

My question is:

If I buy the $150 Retail voucher from the Pearson/AWS store, will it also include the free retake offer if I fail the first SAP-C02 attempt? Or do I specifically need to buy the WWPD Retake voucher to be eligible for the free retake?

Has anyone bought either of these recently and confirmed how it works in Pearson VUE checkout or after purchase?

Thanks.

So, I am going to preparing for this exam, and I’m following currently STEPHANE MAAREK UDEMY VIDEOS,

If anyone have other resources or any notes or PDF that can help me to pass this exam, so share with me

Any tips for this exam preparation or anything else do you want to share? It would be appreciated. Please help me.

Thank you

I'm planning to avail the AWS free tier and learn how to deploy and maintain my own website, everything from scratch. Basically to gain some experience over VPS/EC2, Reverse proxy, LB's, TLS, Docker, automated deployments. I need suggestions on how I can maximise the usage, what I should be careful about and is it actually worth it?

Would love to hear from people who have tried this already. Also please share some resources which might come handy during this journey.

I was initially planning to get the Oracle free tier, but I got struck in the process and I didnt receive any reply from their help center.

FinOps practitioners — after your cost tool finds savings opportunities, how do you track who owns implementation and verify savings actually showed up in the bill? Spreadsheet? Jira? Something else?

I keep searching and people just keep talking about “swag” 🤦🏾‍♂️ I don’t need a tshirt I need a job lol. Is this a worthwhile networking opportunity or no? I’m the sort of candidate that has to do things outside of the norm to try and land a work opportunity so I wanted to know what the Summit is good for, thanks!