Cloud cost management is often associated with billing dashboards and monthly reports. In reality, the first cost decision happens when infrastructure is declared.
This lesson explains how Terraform affects AWS spending by showing how resource declarations become billing relationships after deployment. It also covers the difference between usage-based and capacity-based costs, the importance of tagging resources for ownership, separating environments to control spending, removing orphaned infrastructure through Terraform state, and using account boundaries to isolate unexpected costs.
Understanding these design decisions helps prevent unnecessary spending before AWS provisions a single resource.