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

elliott-king.github.io

51–60 of 293 posts

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

#51
Every official AWS guide is designed to make you use as many AWS services as possible, which increases the risk of spend. You have to be extremely critical of anything they recommend (GUI defaults, CLI tools, guides, recommended architectures etc).

There's a reason there are very well paid positions in companies to guide colleagues on how to use AWS cost-effectively and with lower risk.

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

#52
All this pay-as-you-go BS is such a scam (note: I'm not blaming victims here.) There's just so many ways to screw you. Like a program gets bug and starts sending out a metric crap load of traffic. Or you get DDoSed and charged for the bandwidth. Or your disk fills up from log file spam, it gets 'backed up', you get charged for it. Or a program is caught in a loop and uses limited CPU usage.

I think its all hiding the fact that people don't want to take the time to design (and maintain) scalable infrastructure and instead rely on fake abstractions that pretend to be infinite, always-available, magic, or w/e. I'm sure there is some open source software that helps here.

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

#53
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The billing department knows exactly what you were running, but they only tell you once a month...

They tell you in hourly increments for almost everything?

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

#54
post #3

It is sad experience but I disagree with the author here > It’s so difficult to be paranoid about every single technology you use. I would be paranoid with anything related to AWS, I don't want to risk my bankruptcy (or near bankruptcy experience) on small mistakes or the goodwill of the AWS support.

I think you're agreeing with them?

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

#55
post #4

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

_Learnt_ self-hosting? You mean people this days start from the cloud as a default? …ah, yeah, right. Damn I’m old.

Yes, thats why all these services are popping up and earning tons of cash… look at next.js for example.

They lead young devs into their framework and make them believe that the only way to serve their sites is through them, and to pay their extortionate prices…

People are not educated to self host. Everything is run in a “droplet” and just a click away.

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

#56
post #27
post #15

Let's say 25% of people dont argue with customer service for a chargeback. Best run company in the world /s

It's a Tim foil hat pet conspiracy that I have, but I strongly believe that part important of the business model (or revenue share) is from people making mistakes or forgetting resources; more or less like gym subscriptions where the gym owners are more than happy to sell the [maximum_amount_of _people + 40%] knowing that the absenteeism will give the revenue offset that sustain part of the business.

There's certainly wastage in large organisations. Over provisioning or keeping that huge S3 bucket full of data from some long forgotten project.

I suspect a lot of the huge AWS customers just eat this because it's so hard to mitigate.

If a business has hundreds of AWS accounts it becomes very hard to track, and if each account can only shave a few hundred dollars a month off their individual bill then there's very little impetus to actually do the work for the individual teams. Despite that possibly adding up substantial savings for the overall business.

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

#58
post #43
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'd like to immortalise this comment because it's exactly the kind of thing that annoys me when people say "cloud is easier" or that it requires fewer skills/people/resources.

It clearly does, it's just different skills/time/energy requirements compared to colocation.

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

#59
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.

The people who write these tutes have (I imagine) an unlimited budget with some special account which maybe leads to this situation

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

#60
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…

Sooooo, if a scripts asks you to run it as root, you just trust it and don't check what it does before?
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