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Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

cloudirregular.substack.com

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

#141

Post by XorNot »

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.

The AWS default view feels more crisp for me, compared to the GCP one which feels very "floaty".

Their UI toolkit for that at least is on point.

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

#142

Post by stadium »

twodave wrote: post #105
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…

Have to agree with the others. For example, while setting up ELB it's possible to select at least one option (un-checking the Public IP box) that causes the setup to just fail with a nonsensical error message. Turns out ELB requires a public IP to communicate with the nodes. That's just the most glaring one off the top of my head. I also remember trying to set up SFTP whenever it was first released. It was literally…

cdk is promising for things like this, way safer and easier than rolling your own scripts with bash or python.

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

#143

Post by farnsworth »

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.

AWS charges me $1 or $2 every month, and I log into my account and click through every page and can't find a single active service or any clue on what it's for. It's marked "EC2 - Other", whatever the f that means

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

#144

Post by ActorNightly »

nemothekid wrote: post #54

> “It’s the student’s responsibility to know what they’re deploying.” Anyone who seriously argues this is 100% unaware of the quagmire that is AWS billing. There are companies with entire teams built around just optimizing AWS billing - it's whole unsurprising that some AWS feature actually spun up 5 separate AWS features that end up being billed.

Ill seriously argue this.

The issue is that when students are "learning" "cloud", they are not really learning cloud as much as following tutorials to click together turnkey solutions. Dynamo DB, ElasicSearch, and whatever else are all business-oriented, quick to set up services. And such, these services are hiding what is going on underneath, with the expectation that the company will cover the costs of whatever those services run. This is a standard buisness practice.

If you want to learn how to put together cloud solutions with those technologies involved, you don't even need an AWS account. All you need is a decent laptop or a desktop, with docker or VM software, where you install everything yourself and learn how to configure it (since all of the software is free), do all the networking yourself. This is what actually learning the cloud involves and translating those skills to AWS is very easy.

Perhaps the blame is on the universities and/or tutorials that push the students towards creating free AWS accounts, but regardless, there should be some incentive to takes one profession seriously so you don't end up making this mistake in a company that will not have protections in place that people want for free tier. And money is as good as incentive as any. Id rather people be smarter rather than treat ignorance as a standard and put blame on others for not expecting people to be ignorant.

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

#145

Post by 55555 »

NullPrefix wrote: post #21
eric4smith wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would not go that far to say it's fraud. Calm down. Maybe it's something I missed. Maybe its some hidden feature that I did not turn off. But I deleted all my droplets, all my IP's all my firewalls, etc, etc and could not find anything else.

Could it be a convenience charge?

Perhaps a billing fee?

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

#146

Post by hellbannedguy »

chpmrc wrote: post #112
lolsoftware wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn’t cost hundreds of dollars to notarize something. https://www.nationalnotary.org/knowledge-center/about-notari... Edit: as the other comment mentions, most banks where you have an account offer this for free. My local UPS store where I have a mailbox also offers the service to me for free.

I'm not from the US.

In the USA, in Marin County, I was charged $25 per document. The guy doing it was adding a finger print, which is not a bad idea if the originator of the document is present.

(Finger print is not legally required though.)

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

#147

Post by harry8 »

eric4smith wrote: post #20
harry8 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. Wuuuttt? Fraud is what.

I would not go that far to say it's fraud. Calm down. Maybe it's something I missed. Maybe its some hidden feature that I did not turn off. But I deleted all my droplets, all my IP's all my firewalls, etc, etc and could not find anything else.

You have in good faith attempted diligently to have a zero purchase. You cannot even find any purchases. In that case they have reached into your pocket and taken money without your consent. That is just a fact. By mistake? It's being short changed in a shop at the absolute best.

This is not a mistake any company should be able to afford to make. Ever. Under any circumstances. If it really is "just an error" they need to making amends in a very public and obvious way that is clearly expensive to them to show good faith.

But we don't get that. We have to fight from a position of being in the wrong when we have money taken from us by these fraudulent practices to overturn them.

It is necessary to go HARD at the morality of "accidental theft" because it is so prevalent and because all these companies clearly don't consider it a detriment to their reputation.

You've been diligent. When does it become their responsibility to not reach into your pocket when you clearly don't want that. Or anyone's pocket. I'd bet quite a sum that where there is one there is many.

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

#148

Post by batch12 »

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…

The billing statements I see in DO under Billing (sidebar) > Billing history seem pretty verbose to me. If it's not there I would recommend reaching out to their support.

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

#149

Post by mjthompson »

farnsworth wrote: post #143
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.

AWS charges me $1 or $2 every month, and I log into my account and click through every page and can't find a single active service or any clue on what it's for. It's marked "EC2 - Other", whatever the f that means

Possibly a disassociated elastic IP address?

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

#150

Post by Waterluvian »

Last month I woke up to an amazon alert that our usually $5000 monthly bill was $125 000.

I ran to my computer too fast to have time for a panic attack. Turns out my company bought some services through AWS and it was all kosher.

I wish it wasn't possible to rack up such a bill by accident so I don't have to worry.

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