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I Followed the Official AWS Amplify Guide and Was Charged $1,100

elliott-king.github.io

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Re: I Followed the Official AWS Amplify Guide and Was Charged $1,100

#11

Post by whiskey-one »

icemelt8 wrote: post #4

ever since I learnt self-hosting, it feels so liberating

At our company we host our web app stack and services in a cloud provider, but we don’t use managed services other than Kubernetes. Then everything on top is open source services and apps we host. It’s a big overhead to setup and maintain but I feel once the learning cost is absorbed one time we have high degree of flexibility and also resiliency against random resources getting added behind the scenes and costing us money. The critical part is to stay on top of config & updates since a lot of the apps won’t update themselves or even report an update is needed, and ending up with a vulnerable dependency may be orders of magnitude worse than 1-5K incidental expense.

Re: I Followed the Official AWS Amplify Guide and Was Charged $1,100

#13

Post by forgotoldacc »

I've been putting off digging into AWS for years now, and it's because of stories like these. There really should be a standardized training course that requires no credit card info and lets people experiment for free.

Instead they have some pencil pushers calculating that they can milk thousands here and there from "user mistakes" that can't be easily disputed, if at all. I'm sure I'm not the only person who's been deterred from their environment due to the rational fear of waking up to massive charges.

Re: I Followed the Official AWS Amplify Guide and Was Charged $1,100

#14

Post by braza »

icemelt8 wrote: post #4

ever since I learnt self-hosting, it feels so liberating

> ever since I learnt self-hosting, it feels so liberating

+1

Last year I went to self-hosting and I felt the same. I paid less than USD 2000 for a small laptop that I use as a server plus a home NAS and by my current utilization I got in 3 months the return plus the ownership and flexibility.

Re: I Followed the Official AWS Amplify Guide and Was Charged $1,100

#16

Post by NBJack »

themanmaran wrote: post #9

Par for the course for AWS. I tried following their quickstart Sagemaker guide to run Llama 2 a few months back. And it certainly spins up quick, but next day I realize it's running me $400/day. I was able to get the charges reversed, but definitely learned not to trust their guides.

Bug: Guide charged the user $400/day

Status: Won't fix (working as intended)

Notes: Got the author promoted to SDE III for great impact and revenue boost

Re: I Followed the Official AWS Amplify Guide and Was Charged $1,100

#17

Post by baq »

EduardoBautista wrote: post #12

Maybe official AWS guides should include a tutorial to set billing alerts and limits as a prerequisite to many of their guides.

Maybe AWS could develop the feature that everybody asks for - the OOM killer (where OOM stand for 'out of money')

Re: I Followed the Official AWS Amplify Guide and Was Charged $1,100

#19

Post by etothepii »

forgotoldacc wrote: post #13

I've been putting off digging into AWS for years now, and it's because of stories like these. There really should be a standardized training course that requires no credit card info and lets people experiment for free. Instead they have some pencil pushers calculating that they can milk thousands here and there from "user mistakes" that can't be easily disputed, if at all. I'm sure I'm not the only person who's been…

It is very unusual for AWS not to issue refunds in situations like this, so I don't think it's a function of them finding an edge to milk thousands from user mistakes. More likely they've found that issuing refunds is less onerous than it would be to provide accurate and cheap tutorials.

Perhaps that does not excuse the behaviour but AWS reversed a $600 charge I incurred using AWS Textract where the charges were completely legitimate and I was working for a billion dollar enterprise.

Re: I Followed the Official AWS Amplify Guide and Was Charged $1,100

#20

Post by karolist »

braza wrote: post #8

> Even if you are not using Amplify/OpenSearch, I recommend getting familiar with AWS budgets. > It’s so difficult to be paranoid about every single technology you use. I do not know what others feel but with this kind of frictionless setup, plus low intuitivity in the UX/UI of those services, people are not concerned about setting up a credit card, and billing bundling between services (e.g. AWS batch + Lambda + EC2…

I feel so to. The cloud billing model shifts responsibility to users under the guise of "flexibility" and "customization". Imagine a car rental company that charges you by the millisecond for every component - engine camshaft revolutions, tire rotations, windshield wiper activations, seat heating time and so on, but has the ability to set up alerts for each component so that customers "control" their usage and budget. It's just user hostile, risky by default cost model.
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