I Almost Burned $3,600 With One Line of Terraform (Caught Just in Time)

Hey DevOps Engineers,

This week, I want to share something real.

I was upgrading our staging environment using Terraform.
Just one change: a VM size upgrade from Standard_B2s to Standard_D4s_v5.

A 10-second edit.

No errors. No review comments. All green.

But later that day, I opened the Azure Pricing Calculator to double-check.

That one VM? $150/month.

Multiply that across 6 environments, and we’re looking at $900/month — over $10,800/year.
Even just in staging, that’s $1,800 a year for… nothing.

And no one would’ve caught it.

The Hard Lesson:

Cloud cost is no longer just a finance issue — it’s a DevOps bug.

It won’t crash your build.
It won’t fail your tests.
But it will quietly drain your budget.

✅ The Fix:

We made three changes:

• Introduced per-environment VM sizing in our Terraform modules

• Integrated cost visibility into our pull requests

• Added cost guardrails so no PR can quietly spike our budget

Now, every PR shows its real monthly impact in dollars — before we hit merge.

🎥 Watch It Happen:

I’ve recorded the whole story — from the mistake to the fix — in this week’s video:
👉 Watch the full breakdown on YouTube

🧠 Want the Terraform Source Code?

The exact code I used in this video (with cost estimation + fixes) is available for all active newsletter subscribers.

👉 If you’re reading this, you’re already in!
You’ll get the download link in the next issue or bonus drop. Stay tuned.
(And if a friend wants it — tell them to subscribe here: https://learnwithdevopsengineer.beehiiv.com/subscribe)