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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

#171

Post by slics »

I used the free tier account to play around for a while. I thought I had deleted everything before the end of the year free tier. I was wrong! For 2 months I paid $10 as I could not figure it out what the heck was running.

I had to close my account in order to stop the charges. Today when I hear anyone speak of AWS free tier for a year, first thing I warn them about is to make sure they keep track of what they create so they will know what to delete, otherwise they will keep buying Starbucks every month to AWS.

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

#172

Post by sixothree »

reilly3000 wrote: post #162

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…

We would definitely spend more money on AWS services if our company could feel more secure in understanding which project those costs were associated with and were able to track the costs without spending multiple hours.

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

#173

Post by scarface74 »

ineedasername wrote: post #80

I don't understand why there isn't at least a setting that says "turn everything off if I hit $x." Then just given people a certain grace period to reactivate or get their data out before it's removed. It wouldn't fix production deployments where you want alarms, not a shutdown, when you hit spending caps, but it would help people on the dev stage to avoid issues like this.

So let’s say they “turn everything off”. Does that include deleting all of your objects in S3? Deleting your database? Deleting your attached disks (AMIs)? Deleting your DNS entries?

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

#174

Post by banana_giraffe »

The thing that always gets me: I _think_ some of this is a solved problem within AWS. I've never used it before, but the AWS Educate "offers students no-cost access to a specified, capped amount of AWS cloud resources without requiring a credit card for payment".

That sounds a lot like what I want a free tier to be. Let me play for a bit, set hard guard rails so I can't accidently spend $100, or much much worse. I mean, I can understand requiring a CC to do this, but that's mostly so I don't spin up a ton of free accounts and also so the friction to going to a paid plan is lower.

It's too late for me, my personal AWS account is well outside of the free tier, but the first time I spun on a large instance to test it out I was so insanely nervous I'd screw up and end up with a huge bill. I can totally see someone else backing out at that point out of fear, but if I knew I'd hit the guardrail before spending money, even if it meant losing an instance, I'd have totally be happier to play around.

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

#175

Post by ufmace »

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.

Their web console UIs vary widely by service. IMO, the UX for most of their simpler services, specifically SQS, S3, Lambda, DynamoDB, are really easy to use and work nicely. If you want to start with a Docker image, send it to AWS, and have it get spun up and attached to a DNS, well that's a huge complex mess to get set up.

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

#176

Post by StratusBen »

I'm Co-Founder of http://vantage.sh/ and we allow you to connect your AWS account(s) and we'll monitor cloud spend on your behalf.

We send out regular cost report emails to try and help folks avoid situations like this and have some future plans around anomaly detection to try and help out in advance of things like this happening.

I strongly encourage folks to sign up and let us monitor things on your behalf. We have a free tier that likely covers a lot of personal users here.

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

#177

Post by sixothree »

snorkel wrote: post #56
HomeDeLaPot wrote: post #19

Is there seriously no way in AWS/Azure/GCP to specify "Here's my budget, shut everything down if I exceed $X"? I don't use those platforms much but was always surprised I couldn't find anything like that right off the bat. I'll build cloud stuff if it makes sense at work, but if I'm footing the bill I'll stick to something that can provide an actual upper limit.

A spending kill switch can be setup on AWS using AWS Budgets alerts and Lambda but it’s a DIY project, not a built-in feature.

If it can be done DIY, it can be done first party.

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

#178

Post by sl1ck731 »

grioghar wrote: post #151
twodave wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How are people not building in Terraform for an easy ‘destroy’ at the end? I know it’s rhetorical and a lesson learned myself, but yeah… I would expect folks to learn to use this tool to help manage costs this way.

Typically Terraform takes longer to get something working than mindlessly clicking through the console. In my experience those mindless clickthrough things end up sticking around for years even when they weren't intended to.

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

#179

Post by mcny »

dinkleberg wrote: post #164
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.

I had (have?) an Azure account through my university account and while I agree that Azure services such as Container Service are (in my not so humble opinion) ridiculously overpriced but the fact it I never entered payment details to use my USD 100 of free credit on Azure. I effectively have spending cap of zero dollars.

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

#180

Post by sprynr »

I had a class last semester where we were required to use AWS. Our professor tried his best to teach everyone how to be responsible with their tool use and how to predict their costs (As well as how to set up a free education account and get AWS credits). I was amazed when final presentations rolled around my group had a total cost of 4.30 dollars after 5 months of uptime and use, while other groups had costs ranging from 30 to 150 dollars! I use AWS for my job so I guess I just never really went through those growing pains, but no system should be that easy to rack up costs unknowingly.
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