Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt
cloudirregular.substack.com
Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt
1–10 of 457 posts
Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt
#2Scary, I'd have similar fears about using Firebase/Firestore in a production app.
Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt
#3I had an AWS account that charged me like $6 per month for a year after I thought I had turned everything off. I finally went on a hunt for what was causing it, and had to escalate to support to find it. This was 11/12 my fault I admit, I should have been on it after the first month.
More recently, I was looking for a cloud GPU provider, and tried a different provider that I won't name. I tried out a ~$3 per hour instance, and shut it down after maybe 20 min. A few hours later I (thankfully) started getting billing alerts that my bill would be $1500 ish at the end of the months if my usage kept up. I couldn't find anything still running, could not get anything from support (they had some kind of chat support that told me to open a ticket), first opened a ticket then after and then after ab hour shut down my account as a last ditch effort. At which point they promptly emailed me an invoice for the $16 I had incurred during the time before I cancelled. The help desk relied to my ticket like a week later, asking for more information.
Needless to say, I won't ever use that company again, but it could have been a lot worse, even more so if I was a student or someone who blew their whole experimentation budget on whatever mistake I made.
Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt
#4is there an IAC template somewhere that resets an aws account to 0 and deletes everything? I know this articles point is this shouldn't be possible, but as long as it is, there should be a simple measure, that could be linked in tutorials for stopping ongoing charges.
Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt
#5I've gotten thousands of euro of 'free' Amazon cloud credits over the years, and would love to have used tried it out for cloud computing/GPU stuff, but the opaqueness of pricing means I won't touch it (except for S3 backups) - I just don't trust myself enough to not mess up.
Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt
#6Yup. Got charged over $800 for "experimenting" with a DynamoDB database and forgetting to delete it afterwards.
Sure, I called customer support and they reversed the charges. But something the nice lady on the other end said as she chuckled: "This happens all the time".
DigitalOcean is the worst with the dormant accounts. Just got dinged around $2.40 on my credit card. Going into DO I could not find what was causing that charge. There was nothing there. Wuuuttttt.
Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt
#7AWS offers throw away accounts during immersion days, jam sessions, etc (especially at re:invent). It would be great if these were extended to the general public, even if at a small fee.
Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt
#8Arguably discovering surprise bills absolutely should be part of the free tier, how else can you mentally prepare for running something in production on AWS?
Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt
#9is there an IAC template somewhere that resets an aws account to 0 and deletes everything? I know this articles point is this shouldn't be possible, but as long as it is, there should be a simple measure, that could be linked in tutorials for stopping ongoing charges.
Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt
#10is there an IAC template somewhere that resets an aws account to 0 and deletes everything? I know this articles point is this shouldn't be possible, but as long as it is, there should be a simple measure, that could be linked in tutorials for stopping ongoing charges.