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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

#391

Post by nrmitchi »

thayne wrote: post #222
grioghar wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

terraform 'destroy' isn't infallible. There are certain resources that trigger the creation of other resources (for example, lambda functions will create cloudwatch log groups, and dynamodb tables create cloudwatch alarms) and when terraform destroys the resource, it doesn't necessarily clean up all the associated resources.

Terraform has it's shortcomings for sure, but I don't think it's reasonable to expect Terraform to go out and clean up second-order effects of it's resources.

I'm not doubting that the situations you describe are true, but abandoning resources like that is an AWS-lifecycle problem, not really a Terraform one.

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

#392

Post by erikerikson »

Graffur wrote: post #339
swiftcoder wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also going to point out, as a former AWS engineer, that "too hard" isn't in the AWS engineering vocabulary. If an AWS engineer were to dismiss something as "too hard", they'd be on the fast track to a performance-improvement-plan. The problem isn't that it's too hard. It's that it isn't a business priority. As soon as it becomes prioritised, a legion of very smart AWS engineers will solve it.

This is in line with all the bad things I've heard about Amazon. Why do people work there?

Scale that isn't available in most companies.

A culture they feel aligned with.

They are poor or high burn rate consumers.

They are curious.

But, it would seem, most of all they have different priorities that you.

I write that as someone who routinely dismisses their recruitment attempts.

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

#393

Post by quesera »

sebasvisser wrote: post #270

I thought I was just to incompetent to figure out how to stop an instance…so I just gave up while watching my creditcard getting billed for about €20 each month.. Last month I went full on and spent a few hours removing everything on every screen I could find. After many hours of failing to remove an instance because you have to stop a thingie from auto starting on another screen first…and another thingie from runnin…

I'll bet you created the environment with Elastic Beanstalk, whose job it is to (among other things) replace instances if they fail.

When you stopped the instance in EC2, EB did its job and created a new instance.

You eventually figured this out and killed the EB env, and the instances stopped reappearing.

But the Elastic IP address assigned to your EB env is still on your account, and it's no longer free of charge, because you don't have a running instance.

So you will be billed about a €/mo until you delete the Elastic IP reservation.

This is ridiculously confusing, and ridiculously common.

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

#394

Post by drewzero1 »

mschuster91 wrote: post #321
drewzero1 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The interesting thing is, accounts being off by a penny or two (excluding actions such as customers doing a mis-type in the bank transfer) can actually point to deeper issues such as improper rounding somewhere in the path.

Usually they wrote us a check for the wrong amount at some point and end up with a small balance remaining in their account. We don't want to just forgive and forget every time somebody owes us $0.16, but if it's been there months and it's going to take extra effort to get it from them, it's probably not worth it.

We do try to determine where the discrepancy started and watch for indicators of a bigger issue.

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

#395

Post by fragmede »

crispyambulance wrote: post #354
swiftcoder wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also going to point out, as a former AWS engineer, that "too hard" isn't in the AWS engineering vocabulary. If an AWS engineer were to dismiss something as "too hard", they'd be on the fast track to a performance-improvement-plan. The problem isn't that it's too hard. It's that it isn't a business priority. As soon as it becomes prioritised, a legion of very smart AWS engineers will solve it.

As an antidote to the "nothing is too hard" flex... Everything has trade-off's. When a responsible person says something is "too hard" it's because they've evaluated the consequences and have deemed them too costly in terms of time, resources, cost, maintenance, or strategy/lost-opportunity. Some things really are "too hard". I agree it's not too hard technically but am surprised at your contradictory suggestion AWS…

The problem is, what to do when your account hits the limit? The subtle point about EC2 is you can’t actually shut down servers and have them come back up later unless you have a specific configuration - which not everybody has, so you can’t simply power off systems and not destroy something. Not insurmountable, but not trivial either. You also can’t say that there’s a limit except for an incompatible subset of products, nor can you ask users to be okay with randomly destroying things - the mere rumor of that destroys user trust in something. (Who’s still shy about using EBS despite the last major incident being back in… 2016? Also that outage was limited to one region.)

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

#396

Post by murukesh_s »

dmitriid wrote: post #342
murukesh_s wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

agreed especially when compared to say Heroku or Digital ocean. I see many new comers struggling to deploy a small website. It's overwhelming. I understand that Heroku exists for such users and they are using AWS under the hood, but is there any service which takes AWS cloud APIs and simplifies it with a leaner UX?

> agreed especially when compared to say Heroku or Digital ocean. Funnily enough, I've never ever been able to understand what Heroku is, or how to deploy anything useful on it :) But I'm old, and I've always found it easier to tinker with nginx configs.

Heroku is very simple - you just create an app and "push" code to a repository tied to the app. You need to write code of course, but they auto-detect the language and prepare the environment or platform for you (so platform as a service). They tried to appease the geeks by making everything powered by CLI - but otherwise its just point and click for deploying apps.

Tinkering with nginx is good, but what if you want to add a database, a cache, a logging service? What if you want to automatically build code when you push to github? What if you want to easy clone multiple environments (for staging, prod etc) without never doing an SSH into server? What if you want to have versioned releases that you can easily rollback to a specified version or push a branch into one environment and another branch into another environment? And you get a workable subdomain for every environment you build with SSL enabled. All of that can be scaled down and up with literally few clicks.

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

#397

Post by BackBlast »

anothernewdude wrote: post #326
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…

My business uses off-cloud backups, devops and prepaid credit cards to limit our risk exposure.

I assume you're not also using AWS? Otherwise even with a prepaid card, on AWS you are granting them blank checks via unlimited invoicing abilities.

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

#398

Post by Dudeman112 »

orangepanda wrote: post #344
Graffur wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is in line with all the bad things I've heard about Amazon. Why do people work there?

Why is this particular thing bad? "Too hard" is not an excuse. They have all the resources they need at their disposal to get the job done.

If there is no X for which you can say "X is too hard" without getting PIP'ed, then your work environment is dysfunctional.

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

#399

Post by dahart »

davidgatti wrote: post #346
onion2k wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you seriously suggesting that someone who wants to use AWS should go and read all the documentation and watch all the official videos available? That would take literally years. It's huge. It also doesn't solve the problem. If the user makes a mistake they still lose a ton of money. It's a really interesting problem. It's getting too big and too scary for a new developer to jump in and try AWS services, which mea…

1. yes I am, studying years to be a doctor, lawyer, Engineer etc from your point of view is also to much? Should you just start cutting people to figure out how a body works end expect for everything to be ok once you are done? The point being, yes you have to study to learn something, there is no way around it. 2. If money is a concern to you, then I should focus on learning how exactly the billing works and how to…

There’s room for a little bit of the personal responsibility argument, but it’s ineffective when you take it way too far.

> studying years to be a doctor [...] Should you just start cutting people

Spoken like someone who’s never used AWS or been a doctor. Your analogy is horribly, badly flawed. Doctors do start cutting people, in the US nearly all med students dissect a cadaver at the start of their first year. What you’re suggesting is doing years of pure documentation reading, unguided by other people or a curriculum, before practicing AWS, which would be silly and a waste of time. People learn by practicing, which is why med students dissect cadavers, and which is why AWS offers a “free” platform to learn by practicing, tutorials to guide the learner, and advertising to attract learners.

> If money is a concern

Maybe this is why AWS offers a “Free Tier”? https://aws.amazon.com/free/

> AWS is not for developers

That’s not what AWS says https://aws.amazon.com/developer

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

#400

Post by sethammons »

Dudeman112 wrote: post #398
orangepanda wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is this particular thing bad? "Too hard" is not an excuse. They have all the resources they need at their disposal to get the job done.

If there is no X for which you can say "X is too hard" without getting PIP'ed, then your work environment is dysfunctional.

Pretty sure is the ask was to solve the Halting Problem that you wouldn’t get in trouble.
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