Your AWS Config Bill Is a Monument to Bad DevOps

AWS Config is screaming at symptoms you engineered

Every time Config flags another unencrypted volume, publicly readable bucket, or drifted security group, it is tattling on choices your team made willingly. You chose to rely on runtime policing instead of tightening the spigot upstream. The bill is just AWS charging rent for your complacency.

Push the guardrails left or keep lighting money on fire

Static analysis for Infrastructure-as-Code is not bleeding-edge anymore. Terraform Validate, Checkov, tfsec, cfn-nag; pick your poison. Wire them into pull request checks so that “create unencrypted volume” changes never leave Git. Do it right and Config has nothing to monitor except a sea of compliant resources, which means lower event counts and a cheaper bill.

If your developers can merge insecure templates without a single red pipeline, that is not freedom; it is willful negligence subsidized by your FinOps team. Shift the scrutiny left and starve Config of the chaos it feeds on.

IAM can be cheaper than compliance theater

You do not need a Config rule to yell about unencrypted EBS volumes if the IAM role deploying them physically cannot call ec2:CreateVolume without KMS encryption parameters. Lock down roles with service control policies, permission boundaries, or just plain old least privilege. Prevent the action entirely and the Config rule becomes redundant.

Repeat after me: if a human cannot create the problem, you do not need to pay AWS to detect it. Apply the same logic to S3 public ACLs, security group ingress, and IAM wildcard policies. Control plane restrictions are cheaper than runtime tattling.

Drift detection should confirm, not babysit

Config is valuable as a last-mile auditor, not as a primary control. Use it to catch the rare anomaly, validate your assumptions, and prove to auditors that guardrails work. When Config is catching dozens of violations per week, it is diagnosing systemic process failure. Fix the process; do not double down on surveillance.

Stop romanticizing heroic clean-up

Celebrating the team that spends Fridays clearing Config violations is like applauding the arsonist for operating the fire extinguisher. The real heroes write policies and pipelines that make Config alerts boring.

Fire the babysitter, hire better parents

Invest in IaC linting, policy-as-code, and intentional IAM. Stop paying AWS Config to parent your cloud because you are unwilling to enforce discipline. Your finance team and your engineers who crave autonomy with guardrails will thank you.