Developer made one wrong click and sent his AWS bill into the stratosphere

Who, Me? Welcome to another week of work, a moment The Register celebrates with a new installment of Who, Me? It's the reader-contributed column in which you 'fess up to follies, false moves, and faux pas – and explain how you escaped.

This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Chase" who develops free open source software for scientists.

The Register knows that open source development can be thankless, so thanks for your efforts, Chase!

But we digress. Back to Chase's story.

"We use AWS EC2 to run ephemeral build agents for continuous integration," he told The Register. "It may spin up a dozen instances per day and shut them down when they're no longer used."

Chase and his fellow developers have used this technique for about ten years, and their AWS bills have been predictable – usually between $1,000 and $2,000 each month. They therefore ...