Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

cloudirregular.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 457 posts

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#121

Post by _carbyau_ »

HumblyTossed wrote: post #99

> Corey Quinn, your first and last stop for any question that touches AWS billing, has called for an updated free tier that treats “personal learning” AWS accounts differently from “new corporate” accounts, and sets hard billing limits that you can’t exceed. This would be good. I don't normally do "cloud" stuff. It's just not my skill set. But I have looked at it on occasion and one thing that turns me off is my inab…

+1 Same boat.

I don't know how to work with AWS. I don't want to pay $$$ for a "course" for something that I can explore with a "free" tier.

I logged onto AWS. Looked around, figured I had no idea what I would be charged and what the "free" tier meant I could do exactly.

So I logged out and haven't been back.

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#122

Post by okareaman »

lazide wrote: post #100
okareaman wrote: post #82

When I read about the myriad predatory practices of Amazon I think about who the predator is and the saying "the fish rots from the head." I'm looking forward to the day Jeff Bezos pays the price for being the predator that he is.

He’s already left - you’re going to be waiting a long time.

He's moved from chief executive to executive chairman. In no sense has he 'left'

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#123

Post by quantico »

simonw wrote: post #79
kossTKR wrote: post #55

Lots of companies also gets hacked each month for thousands of dollars because some key to S3 with too many privileges gets leaked. The entire system is completely sinister. The fact that keys pertaining to S3 has anything do with being able to start hundreds of VM's in different parts of the AWS system or do whatever is bad. I've seen companies be ruined by this, and it's in no way obvious how stupid their system is…

The feature I most want from AWS is a simple way to create credentials that are only allowed to read from or write to a specific S3 bucket. The way you do this at the moment genuinely involves copying and pasting JSON policy documents around! It's horrific. I want this for myself, but more importantly I want it for users of software that I write. I would love to be able to build something that stores a user's data in…

They simply have to be in separate AWS accounts for this to work. To that end, you can provide them with a CloudFormation template that deploys a stack with the necessary configuration.

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#124

Post by okareaman »

labster wrote: post #120
okareaman wrote: post #82

When I read about the myriad predatory practices of Amazon I think about who the predator is and the saying "the fish rots from the head." I'm looking forward to the day Jeff Bezos pays the price for being the predator that he is.

He already lost half his wealth to his ex-wife, what more are you waiting for?

He's probably glad he's no longer married to his ex and he's still a mega billionaire. Not much punishment.

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#125

Post by xyzzy_plugh »

HumblyTossed wrote: post #99

> Corey Quinn, your first and last stop for any question that touches AWS billing, has called for an updated free tier that treats “personal learning” AWS accounts differently from “new corporate” accounts, and sets hard billing limits that you can’t exceed. This would be good. I don't normally do "cloud" stuff. It's just not my skill set. But I have looked at it on occasion and one thing that turns me off is my inab…

Yeah this is a huge problem. I suspect this is significant for people to choose inferior non-hosted alternatives just for peace of mind. Hard limits would probably create a large influx of users.

Even for something as simple as S3, I'm hesitant to use the real service during development because it's so easy to stack up charges. For one of my accounts, the usual bill is <$10 but last month it was $27 because there was some network flakiness that resulted in excessive transfer.

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#126

Post by ashtonbaker »

willcipriano wrote: post #48
eric4smith wrote: post #6

Yup. 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…

Apparently I owe AWS 1 cent for DNS. The problem is I can't login to pay it, so every month I get a email that says "your aws account is going to be suspended" and 30 days later I'm disappointed that they didn't follow through with the threat.

They do this to me too every month, as the card on my AWS has expired, and they complain and complain and complain before finally charging the card on my Audible account. Definitely need to get around to separating those.

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#127

Post by spaetzleesser »

paaakthecaaa wrote: post #74
artichokeheart wrote: post #24

AWS employs cost obfuscation by design otherwise the default view when you open the console would show you all of your current active services. Not only is that not the case, a single screen to show you all of your current active services doesn't exist. You need to take a deep dive into cost explorer (assuming you have access in corporate land) and try to decipher in what that all means.

They definitely need a senior executive to stand up and say, "The Customer wants us to be transparent in billing, fix that now." Then they need to start a team dedicated to finding a good way to let customers halt spending at a given limit with minimal impact on their operations. They already win on UX (okay, okay, it's an opinion ffs), but unlimited liability makes a lot of people very uncomfortable. Those two actio…

"They definitely need a senior executive to stand up and say, "The Customer wants us to be transparent in billing, fix that now.""

Health care shows there is big money to be made with billing non-transparency. I bet AWS senior executives don't want transparency because it would lose them money.

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#128

Post by judge2020 »

thedevelopnik wrote: post #85
paaakthecaaa wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They definitely need a senior executive to stand up and say, "The Customer wants us to be transparent in billing, fix that now." Then they need to start a team dedicated to finding a good way to let customers halt spending at a given limit with minimal impact on their operations. They already win on UX (okay, okay, it's an opinion ffs), but unlimited liability makes a lot of people very uncomfortable. Those two actio…

I’m not trying to be snarky here, would like an honest opinion: how do they win on UX? Are there specific things you like there? I’ve used all three major clouds in production now and I dread using the AWS console. Or really any part of it, over Azure or GCP. I’ve always thought of them as purely winning the “nobody got fired for…” mindshare thing despite having a thoroughly mediocre product.

It either works great or barely depending on the service you're using - some AWS teams have dedicated dashboard teams, eg 'ec2 dashboard team' which solely focus on the dashboard experience, while others touch it as an afterthought.

I'm pretty sure something along the lines of this^ was posted on HN by a former AWS employee but I can't find it now.

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#130

Post by drewzero1 »

saurik wrote: post #63
willcipriano wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently I owe AWS 1 cent for DNS. The problem is I can't login to pay it, so every month I get a email that says "your aws account is going to be suspended" and 30 days later I'm disappointed that they didn't follow through with the threat.

I wonder if there is a human whose job is to final review suspensions and they just keep shaking their head at the measly pending $0.01 charge.

I keep a penny on my desk at work. Every time a coworker comes across somebody's account that is off by a penny, I offer it. They think I'm being funny, but the point I'm trying to make is that it wastes more than pennies worth of our time to spend it worrying about a few cents.

I've seen people mail in checks worth less than the stamp it took to send them. It's a wild world out there.

Post reply on HN