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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

#161

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

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

Yeah, that's an elastic IP, check under EC2.

People forget to clean them up after shutting down the instance (probably kept in case you want to keep your IP)

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

#162

Post by reilly3000 »

AWS represents over 60% of the net profit of the entire Amazon empire across all its divisions and acquisitions. If they truly helped the customer to waste less money, it would have a massive impact on everyone who has stock, from sovereign funds to junior engineers. They have a vested interest in dinging your sandbox account $1/month for storing secrets you haven’t used in 2 years. I don’t see this changing anytime soon, especially when the competition is no better.

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

#163

Post by UglyToad »

yawnxyz wrote: post #84

I've stayed away from AWS for these reasons. Instead I use systems on top of AWS, like Vercel etc. Is it ironic that Amazon's mantra is to be "Customer obsessed" yet AWS is so magnificently confusing for anyone not doing it full-time? As a designer I've used plenty of Digital Ocean, Vercel, Cloudflare Workers and other static hosts without a problem... I've never been able to figure out how to even start on AWS, and…

I'm so miserable that I finally got around to embracing open ecosystems after almost a decade of being Microsoft-poisoned and now everyone is all in on some baffling walled garden with abysmal UX and about 300 different services that you need a damn NASA PhD to understand.

Like the number of times I find myself in some random service/feature/part of AWS like "do we use one of these? how would I even tell?".

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

#164

Post by dinkleberg »

jiggawatts wrote: post #136

Everyone: PLEASE stop making the argument that it's "too hard" or even "impossible" to implement spending limits. As the article points out: Every other cloud does this! They all have non-production subscription types with hard spending limits. There's a difference between "unable" and "unwilling". The people that refuse to understand the difference are the same people that don't understand that "unsupported" isn't s…

Which clouds do this? I work quite a bit with AWS and GCP, and Azure to a lesser extent, and I've yet to see a spending limit on any of them. I'd love to be proven wrong though.

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

#165

Post by [deleted] »

NathanKP wrote: post #106
NullPrefix wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC the excuse is that billing is a separate department and they count all the usage dollars way after you done using it, not in realtime. You would still be able to go over your limit and then who should foot the bill? Realtime counting would be too difficult to figure out, our brightest minds are busy figuring out engagement metrics.

This is my personal opinion, though I do work at AWS: It's not that real time counting is difficult, it is that the amount of compute resources and electricity that would be needed to power real time billing at AWS scale would be astronomical. There is a reason why banks and financial institutions generally do batch processing in the off peak hours when electricity is cheaper and there is less demand for the compute…

[deleted]

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

#167

Post by hannofcart »

> ...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.

Honestly, this is needed for corporate accounts as well. Not all companies are FAANG scale behemoths who can shrug off an unexpected charge.

For a scrappy startup in India, an unexpected $5000 bill would be an existential threat.

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

#168

Post by andrewmcwatters »

hannofcart wrote: post #167

> ...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. Honestly, this is needed for corporate accounts as well. Not all companies are FAANG scale behemoths who can shrug off an unexpected charge. For a scrappy startup in India, an unexpected $5000 bill would be an existential threat.

A scrappy startup in India is not AWS' ICP.

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

#169

Post by sixothree »

adamparsons wrote: post #108

I cancelled an account 2 years ago because no matter how much I explored cost manager or any regions I used, I can't find why I still get billed a small dollar or so a month. I still get bills on the 3rd of each month, followed by a "we can't charge your card" (I removed it when they pulled this shit) followed by a few days later you get the "hey we're gonna suspend your account if you don't pay" Yeah cool, I only cl…

The cost explorer is beyond deplorable. It provides either too little information or information that is so fine-grained it becomes useless.

It infuriates me the hoops we need to jump through just to understand how much a single virtual machine costs. Or in cases like yours - to find out what resource a charge was for. Impossible.

Designed to be impossible. FFS. We would spend more money if we were able to manage costs better.

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

#170

Post by Retric »

czgs2woh4ue3 wrote: post #156
NathanKP wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my personal opinion, though I do work at AWS: It's not that real time counting is difficult, it is that the amount of compute resources and electricity that would be needed to power real time billing at AWS scale would be astronomical. There is a reason why banks and financial institutions generally do batch processing in the off peak hours when electricity is cheaper and there is less demand for the compute…

I also work at AWS (nowhere near billing), so the usual disclaimers apply, but: I actually have no idea if billing is real-time or not? I think it's mostly batch, but the records aren't necessarily, though they may be aggregated a bit. The general point in this thread certainly holds: our systems provide service first, bill second, and that by throwing a record over the wall to some other internal system. It's not un…

“Small, cheap things like "a single DynamoDB query" or "a byte of bandwidth" are often also high-volume, and you don't want to introduce billing checks to critical paths for reliability / latency / cost reasons”

That’s hardly necessary. Let’s suppose you have some service that costs 1 cent every 1,000 queries. If you’re billing it then you need to be keeping track of it and incrementing some counter somewhere. If old number mod x PS: Phone companies can pull this stuff off successfully for millions of cellphones. If you’re arguing keeping up with AT&T is to hard, you have serious organizational problems.

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