📌 1-Minute Recap
What happens when someone misconfigures Terraform and applies it on a Friday?
✅ 100 Azure VMs created with premium specs
✅ Terraform apply completed successfully
✅ Azure bill spiked to ~$5,000 before Monday
⚠️ Root cause: no PR review, no cost controls, no guardrails
📥 Full source code + postmortem inside
👀 Who This Is For
You deploy infrastructure using Terraform, Azure, or AWS
You care about cost management and cloud governance
You want real-world DevOps scenarios you can actually learn from
🛠️ The Setup: Friday Apply, Monday Panic
An engineer pushed this:
vm_count = 100
vm_size = "Standard_E64ds_v5"
Terraform created:
📁 terraform-cost-explosion-sim/
├── main.tf – VMs, NICs, subnet, VNet
├── variables.tf – location, VM count + size
├── terraform.tfvars – the misconfig
├── README.md – simulation guide
I ran:
terraform init
terraform plan
terraform apply
Everything worked — and cost thousands.
🔍 What Went Wrong
❌ No cost estimation (Terraform Cloud)
❌ No policy enforcement (Sentinel or OPA)
❌ No Azure Budget or Alert thresholds
❌ No peer review or approval before apply
❌ Applied late Friday = no one watching it all weekend
🧯 By the time someone stopped the VMs, $5,000+ was already billed.
🧠 What To Do Instead
✅ Set Azure Budgets + Alerts
✅ Add policy-as-code checks
✅ Use Terraform Cloud to estimate cost
✅ Enforce PR reviews and approvals
✅ Avoid deploying infra changes late on Fridays
🔐 Bottom line: one line of Terraform can burn your budget if left unchecked.
📥 Get the Code + Prompt
Want to see the full AI-generated code and prompt I used? |
👉 Subscribe to the newsletter and I’ll send you the repo |
Break it.
Fix it.
Run it in a safe sandbox environment.
🎯 Why This Matters
This isn’t just theory. This is a story you can share in interviews and retros:
“Tell me about a time you debugged a Terraform-related cost spike…”
Now you’ve got an answer.
📣 Want Your Tool Featured?
If your product helps teams:
Monitor Terraform cost before apply
Prevent risky cloud deployments
Enforce budget and policy guardrails
📬 Let’s talk — this series is sponsor-friendly and reaching real engineers.
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Let’s make DevOps smarter, safer, and battle-tested — together.
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#Terraform #Azure #CloudCosts #DevOpsSimulation #IaC #CloudGovernance #IncidentSimulation