💸 One Terraform Apply = $5,000 Cloud Bill

📌 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

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:

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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#Terraform #Azure #CloudCosts #DevOpsSimulation #IaC #CloudGovernance #IncidentSimulation