Hey, it’s Lefteris 👋 I’m the voice behind the weekly newsletter “The Cloud Engineers.”
You’re running a production workload on AWS. You set up S3, maybe enabled versioning because “best practice,” and moved on. Six months later, your S3 bill is three times what you expected, and you have no idea why.
You’re not alone. S3 pricing is deceptively simple on the surface, but underneath it hides several cost traps that lifecycle policies are supposed to solve. The problem? Most teams either skip lifecycle rules entirely or configure them in ways that barely help.
Let’s talk about what’s silently eating your budget.
The Versioning Tax
Versioning is great for data protection. Every overwrite or delete keeps the old object around, which means you can recover from accidental changes. What nobody emphasizes: every old version is a billable object.
If you’re writing logs, reports, or processed data that…
