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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

#401

Post by dhimes »

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…

It seems obvious that AWS simply doesn't want you as a customer if you need to implement spending limits. We've all talked about having customers that were too much trouble for the value they bring. Customers with hard spending limits are those customers for Amazon.

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

#402

Post by nineplay »

jd_mongodb wrote: post #343
nineplay wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Azure will alert you when you exceed a budget, but it won't disable anything. Azure MongoDB billing was insanity. I was up to $800 to host a couple of GB that wasn't doing anything. I'm still not sure what happened, even their support kept saying "it's priced by request units" and I kept saying "How does a handful of queries a day translate to $40 in request units?" A year later, I think that I had a lot of collectio…

I work for MongoDB. The writer is referring to CosmosDB, the Microsoft clone of MongoDB. You can runa real MongoDB cluster on Azure with MongoDB Atlas. The pricing model for Atlas is per Node size + disk + memory + data transfer. It's generally easier to predict your costs using this model. Users tend to over-provision with this model so we recommend using auto-scaling. This will allow your cluster to scale up or dow…

We switched to MongoDB Atlas which was awesome but I didn't want to sound like a stealth corporate shill. Atlas rocks!

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

#403

Post by dharmab »

k12sosse wrote: post #378
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.

I routinely tell a coworker that isn't possible so that he does the work for me. Oh I know it's possible, I just don't want to do it. Thanks Corey! You're the best.

This works in help forums too. Post a question, there's a chance you get ignored. Post something wrong, and someone will flame you and answer your question.

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

#404

Post by Red_Leaves_Flyy »

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…

>future hires need to start somewhere, need to be able to learn on their own, and need to do so safely.

I've shared this before on hn, but I was about to bite the bullet on a fire base subscription to back a web app I'm building. Google announced its cancellation the week I was going to subscribe, I was hitting daily limits in my testing with my garage code and wanted the extra buffer to speed up my progress. As soon as they announced the cancellation I ripped out fire base and have been working on a swap to hasura/postgres/auth0. I can't afford, likely multiple, hundred or thousand dollar mistakes for a hobby.

"Just code better"

I'm trying...

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

#405

Post by taftster »

gruez wrote: post #216
taftster wrote: post #212

Another solution to this problem is the availability of disposable credit cards. It would be ideal that credit card numbers could just be created from scratch, as needed, and turned off whenever the use was done. We had promises of this as ecommerce took off, to help avoid fraud. But it seems these don't get widespread adoption, probably because purchases are easy to get chargebacks for (in general). A hard limit for…

1. Does aws even accept prepaid cards? many providers don't dye to fraud/abuse concerns 2. Your payment method refusing to accept charges doesn't mean you're still not on the hook for them. Technically they can still send your bill to collections and wreck your credit report. They probably don't do this, but it's still a bad bandaid solution

Good thoughts/questions, thanks.

1. Not sure, but I think that's the problem I'm asking about. Because prepaid or auto-generated cards are not mainstream, big vendors don't need to accept them.

2. Agreed, but at least this puts one more layer of control back to the owner. AWS doesn't have my birthdate or social security info (US), so it would be harder (not impossible) for them to "wreck your credit report". At least this approach puts an extra barrier in the equation.

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

#406

Post by jd_mongodb »

nineplay wrote: post #402
jd_mongodb wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work for MongoDB. The writer is referring to CosmosDB, the Microsoft clone of MongoDB. You can runa real MongoDB cluster on Azure with MongoDB Atlas. The pricing model for Atlas is per Node size + disk + memory + data transfer. It's generally easier to predict your costs using this model. Users tend to over-provision with this model so we recommend using auto-scaling. This will allow your cluster to scale up or dow…

We switched to MongoDB Atlas which was awesome but I didn't want to sound like a stealth corporate shill. Atlas rocks!

Love to hear that.

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

#407

Post by Red_Leaves_Flyy »

k12sosse wrote: post #378
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.

I routinely tell a coworker that isn't possible so that he does the work for me. Oh I know it's possible, I just don't want to do it. Thanks Corey! You're the best.

This works until it doesn't, once Corey figures you out he might seek revenge...

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

#408

Post by Red_Leaves_Flyy »

kozd wrote: post #384
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.

What is opportunity cost?

Incalculable, thus irrelevant.

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

#409

Post by dmitriid »

murukesh_s wrote: post #396
dmitriid wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> but what if you want to add a database, a cache, a logging service?

I... just add it. How do I add it in heroku where everything is "just create an app and push it" and everything is separate "dynos" (whatever that is), each with different pricing, storage, bandwidth etc.

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

#410

Post by SavantIdiot »

Buttons840 wrote: post #363
SavantIdiot wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I go to billing I can see an itemized breakdown of every service I'm using. What is wrong with that?

Students and self-learners want to experiment with doing complicated things on AWS without getting a surprise $3,000 bill because their script didn't shut down those instances like they thought it did. They want a hard fail-safe to protect them from surprise bills. And they want a solution that's easier and more reliable than checking the AWS itemized breakdown twice a day.

I agree with that. That is why there are "Billing Alarms" in big letters on the billing page. But that wasn't the point of the reply: the person above me was complaining that there's no way to tell what services are being billed, which is bunk.
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