Did you have to consider the cost of any of the components, and what did you observe regarding costs?

Yes, cost was a top‑level concern for every component. We used a combination of tagging, budgeting, and real‑time monitoring to keep costs in check. Every resource—EC2, RDS, S3, Lambda—was tagged with project, environment, and owner. AWS Cost Explorer and Budgets were configured to alert us when spend exceeded thresholds. For compute‑heavy jobs, we leveraged spot instances and reserved instances to reduce hourly rates. We also used CloudWatch metrics to track CPU and memory usage, and we set up custom dashboards in Grafana to visualize cost per service. When a new feature was added, we ran a cost‑impact analysis by estimating the number of executions, data volume, and storage needs, then compared that against our budget. This proactive approach helped us avoid surprise bills and made it easier to justify infrastructure spend to stakeholders.