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

elliott-king.github.io

41–50 of 293 posts

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

#41

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 comp…

> It is very unusual for AWS not to issue refunds in situations like this

...when asked to. But what percentage of mistakes like this end up just being "eaten" by the end-user, not realizing that they can ask for a refund? What percentage don't even get noticed?

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

#42
> I’ll admit that I myself am only using OpenSearch because it supports geo_point bounding-box queries, a subject that I don’t have a full understanding of. Perhaps there is a way to do these with a simpler product, and OpenSearch is overkill.

How about postgres with postgis? https://postgis.net/docs/using_postgis_query.html

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

#43
post #34
post #10

This seems like a glaring bug in the scripts run by that `npx` command. The author is correct, the scripts should 100%: - Choose the lowest cost resource (it's a tutorial!) - Cleanup resources when the `delete` subscript is run I don't think it's fair to expect developers to do paranoid sweeps of their entire AWS account looking for rogue resources after running something like this. If a startup had this behavior wou…

> do paranoid sweeps of their entire AWS account looking for rogue resources That's the thing that annoys me the most about AWS. There's no easy way to find out all the resources I'm currently paying for (or if there's a way, I couldn't find it). Without an easy to understand overview, it feels like I don't have full control of my own account.

You can set up daily or hourly cost and usage reports on the account. I built a finops function based on it, feeding the data into a Postgres db. Make sure to select incremental updates, if not you’ll en up paying for tb of s3 storage.

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

#44
post #32
post #10

This seems like a glaring bug in the scripts run by that `npx` command. The author is correct, the scripts should 100%: - Choose the lowest cost resource (it's a tutorial!) - Cleanup resources when the `delete` subscript is run I don't think it's fair to expect developers to do paranoid sweeps of their entire AWS account looking for rogue resources after running something like this. If a startup had this behavior wou…

Is there even a simple way of listing all the existing resources in an AWS account? I’ve always had to check service by service, region by region. It’s tedious and error-prone.

I thought the tag editor was where one could get a comprehensive inventory of account resources? (Unable to check as I don't currently have easy access to the AWS console)

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

#45

"Billing alerts" are a joke, give us hard spend limits. Then offer a way to set those limits during onboarding. Building a business on blank cheques and accidental spends is shady. It's also a large barrier to adoption. The more times devs see reports like, "I tried [random 20-minute tutorial] and woke up to a bill for my life's savings and luckily support waived the fee this one time but next time they're coming for…

I'm saying this for years and deleted all my personal credit cards on cloud providers which can scale/bankrupt me in a minute.

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

#47
post #32
post #10

This seems like a glaring bug in the scripts run by that `npx` command. The author is correct, the scripts should 100%: - Choose the lowest cost resource (it's a tutorial!) - Cleanup resources when the `delete` subscript is run I don't think it's fair to expect developers to do paranoid sweeps of their entire AWS account looking for rogue resources after running something like this. If a startup had this behavior wou…

Is there even a simple way of listing all the existing resources in an AWS account? I’ve always had to check service by service, region by region. It’s tedious and error-prone.

Cost and usage reports will show you what is being paid for. Then there are resources that won’t show up on that so I have used aws:config to pull down other resource lists and finally you can cross both reports to more less find everything.

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

#48
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there even a simple way of listing all the existing resources in an AWS account? I’ve always had to check service by service, region by region. It’s tedious and error-prone.

I thought the tag editor was where one could get a comprehensive inventory of account resources? (Unable to check as I don't currently have easy access to the AWS console)

Yea it’s ok for that but won’t list everything. Example: ec2 snapshots won’t show up in the aws:config report but you will be charged for it, so Cost and Usage reports will show you what you will be charged for.

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

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 comp…

I accidentally pushed an AWS key to a public repo, and by the next day, had like $50k in charges from crypto miners. AWS reversed the charges, with the only condition that we enable some basic security guardrails that I should have had in place to begin with.

What were the guardrails?
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