Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt • Hacker News Board

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

#431

Post by staticassertion » Thu, May 06, 2021, 1:58 AM UTC

biztos wrote: post #389

crispyambulance wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I would speculate that Amazon doesn’t care about the occasional $200 mistake, and is perfectly happy to refund it should they notice. What they don’t want is companies that are spending say $2-4 million per month to be able to put in a hard limit at $2.5M. I would guess most companies spending millions per month on AWS are just guessing what next month’s bill will be, and have been conditioned to not freak out if it’…

> What they don’t want is companies that are spending say $2-4 million per month to be able to put in a hard limit at $2.5M.

Why not? It would make companies happy.

The reality is that, as much as many would like this feature, I'm not sure that a lot of large customers are actually asking for it. Does anyone who works at a large company know if they've asked for this feature before?

I can imagine why startups might want it, but also, AWS is extremely forgiving with startups and throws tons of money at them, so idk.

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

#432

Post by crdotson » Thu, May 06, 2021, 2:25 AM UTC

ryan29 wrote: post #302

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…

> Every other cloud does this! They all have non-production subscription types with hard spending limits. They don't. I've looked. They all have some ultra complex scheme for monitoring billing and programmatically shutting down services, which is a favorite recommendation by apologists, but none have a nice, solid "shut down everything" plan that's usable for learning and testing. AWS does have billing actions which…

IBM Cloud has Lite accounts, which are quite limited but always free.

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

#433

Post by chpmrc » Thu, May 06, 2021, 2:38 AM UTC

hnbad wrote: post #334

chpmrc wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not from the US. This is not available in any of my banks.

In Germany you can also get documents notarized in (Catholic) parish offices. I think they do it for free. That said, this sounds unreasonable and if you're not in the US this may violate consumer protection regulations if they didn't require the same level of verification to sign the contract in the first place.

It is unreasonable but it's just not worth engaging with them even to exchange a few emails, financially speaking :)

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

#434

Post by chpmrc » Thu, May 06, 2021, 2:40 AM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #134

chpmrc wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not from the US. This is not available in any of my banks.

If notarization isn't common in the country where you are, you should probably escalate through AWS support in that country. They probably have an alternate procedure. If you're talking to US-based support, they are used to thinking this is a trivial request. Getting something notarized is something that can be handled in 5 minutes at places as common as convenience stores. Most people have coworkers that are notarie…

I'm not interested in recovering that account anyway, I'd spend more money (in terms of time spent dealing with them) on trying to get it back than what I'd owe in a few decades.

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

#435

Post by chpmrc » Thu, May 06, 2021, 2:42 AM UTC

ineedasername wrote: post #426

chpmrc wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not from the US.

Then you have not provided enough information to validate your claim. For example, the EU imposes price controls as well, while in Japan it can be expensive. However, there's a much simpler route: Amazon is a US country, so you can simply use notorize.com for $25.

My claim is that it's ridiculous to send $0.01 monthly invoices for an inactive account, not sure what you mean by "validate", maybe it isn't that funny of a story? :) But it doesn't make sense for me to spend even $1 on anything regarding this matter. I'm ok with not having access to that account anyway. If anything they should pay me to go through the hassle.

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

#436

Post by johnghanks » Thu, May 06, 2021, 3:03 AM UTC

jenniferli23 wrote: post #196

nathanaldensr wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With all due respect, I think the issue here is that your company should not need to exist. Amazon should provide this feature as part of the UX.

Yea they should, but if it doesn't, are you gonna keep waiting or do something about it?

If you're operating at a scale that would require something like vantage you probably don't need vantage as you have or will need to have a very good understanding of AWS infra / costs anyways.

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

#437

Post by anonytrary » Thu, May 06, 2021, 4:50 AM UTC

Draken93 wrote: post #289

anonytrary wrote: post #229

Can confirm. Default ElastiCache clustering option chooses an extremely high compute node, I ended up accidentally spending $1300 in a month just for testing some Redis clustering script. The minimum option ends up only costing a few dozen dollars a month. The billing alert did not even trigger until the very end of the month, so I got a $1300 surprise. I complained about it to AWS, mentioning how misleading their sh…

Damn, I can't imagine how you felt... Only the unique experiences in this thread are enough to know how f*cked up AWS billing is.

Felt like a complete idiot, I guess I'm not smart enough to use AWS's UI in a safe way. When we start trusting tools, we inevitably become complacent. Some user flows are designed to be gotcha's. A little gotcha machine that generates |cost - refund| revenue. They gotcha, and there's nothing you can do about it but beg them for a (usually partial) refund. The refund is the thing that makes you feel better about it.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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

#438

Post by davidgatti » Thu, May 06, 2021, 5:27 AM UTC

dahart wrote: post #399

davidgatti wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

People in this discussion are complaining that the free tire is misleading, plus not all services are covered. And it is true that if you turn on a bunch of server and you don't pay for a year, but forget about them, you will be charged the moment the year passes. Not to mention that you will be charged if you use the CPU of the free tire server to much - which probably very few people know about.

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

And my point is that the marketing of AWS is misleading, they try to convince you that if you don't know anything about computers, but you know code, you will be able to manage AWS. This is very misleading because AWS tries to make you think that AWS is a service like Heroku, simple to use, and there is just one button to push to make it all work. Completely false. I've seen countless AWS accounts that were completely misconfigured by developers who thought that AWS easy to manage. A basic example is the autoscaling of EC2. People will go to the autoscaling section of EC2 "enable it" and be superseded when it dose not work. Where the reality is that you have to do 8 other things to make it work, not to mention the work that needs to be done in the OS itself.

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

#439

Post by farnsworth » Thu, May 06, 2021, 5:27 AM UTC

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #161

farnsworth wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I don't have any elastic IPs. The only thing under EC2 is a security group that it won't let me delete, but seems like no resources. My bill this month is $2.88 /shrug

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

#440

Post by farnsworth » Thu, May 06, 2021, 5:31 AM UTC

matwood wrote: post #373

farnsworth wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What does the bill details screen show? I manage an AWS bill and I find it overly detailed. Others mentioned leftover EIPs, but the bill shows these as their own line item. Not saying it can't happen, but I've never seen an 'Other' listed on the bill details screen. As I said above, it's detailed to a fault.

Actually it looks like this is for an EBS snapshot. Now it seems like EBS is a Lightsail feature, and the Lightsail console says that I don't have any storage or snapshots? Hm