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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

#71

Post by dkersten »

I know it’s minor in comparison, but I will never use AWS again after running up a $100 bill trying to get an app deployed to ECS. There was an error (on my side) preventing the service from starting up, but cloud waatch only had logs about 20% of the time, so I had to redeploy five times just to get some logs, make changes, redeploy five more times, etc. They charged me for every single failed deploy.

After about two days of struggling and a $100 bill, I said fuck it, deleted my account and deployed to DigitalOcean’s app platform instead, where it also failed to deploy (the error was with my app), but I had logs, every time. I fixed it in and had it running in under ten minutes, total bill was a few cents.

I swore that day that I would never again use AWS for anything when given a choice, and would never recommend it.

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

#72

Post by KelvinFineBoy69 »

modernerd wrote: post #30

"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…

[dead]

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

#73

Post by theanonymousone »

modernerd wrote: post #30

"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…

> It's also a large barrier to adoption.

e.g. for me. I never dared to get my foot wet with AWS, despite interest. Better safe with a cheap, flat-rate VPS than sorry.

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

#74

Post by [deleted] »

modernerd wrote: post #30

"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…

[deleted]

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

#75

Post by chx »

modernerd wrote: post #30

"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…

> the less they'll want to explore your offerings.

Honestly? All the better. There are obviously use cases where AWS is the right tool for the job but it's extremely rare. It's coasting on hype and somehow attaining "no one was ever fired for buying IBM" status.

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

#76

Post by weinzierl »

modernerd wrote: post #30

"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…

It's not just AWS. I think there are only two types of cloud providers: The ones like AWS and DigitalOcean that shift the risk to the customer and the ones that offer shady "unlimited" and "unmetered" plans.

Neither is what I want. I wish there was a provider with clear and documented limits to allow proper capacity planning while at the same time shifting all the availability risk to the customer but taking on the financial risk. I'd be willing to pay a higher fixed price for that, as long as it is not excessive.

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

#77

Post by pvtmert »

jstrong wrote: post #37

unrelated rant, but I'm still salty about it. needed to send "raw" http requests instead of using their bloated sdk for reasons, and requests failed with "content-type: application/json" header, but succeeded with "content-type: application/x-amz-json-1.0". get out of here with that nonsense.

that's honestly a leak of internal details lol. (leaky abstractions)

because internally most apps are using the coral framework, which is kind of old, using this json format as it has a well defined shape for inputs, outputs, and errors.

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

#78

Post by andrewstuart »

Why are people still doing the major cloud thing?

I just don't get it.

The story of "it's easier" is fake.

The story of "you won't need highly paid technical experts to maintain things" is fake.

The story of "it's cheaper" is fake.

The story of "you can't run your own computers it's too complex for ordinary companies to work out" is fake.

Its all fake and people still are diving headlong into the clouds, falling through and hitting the earth hard.

There's enough discussion in the community about the risks and hazards of major clouds - you only have yourself to blame when that huge bill hits because you did some thing that would have not cost an extra cent on self hosted systems or virtual servers.

Go learn Linux. Go buy virtual servers from IONOS where they charge zero for traffic.

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

#80

Post by high_priest »

arresin wrote: post #59
reddalo wrote: 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 people who write these tutes have (I imagine) an unlimited budget with some special account which maybe leads to this situation

And are experienced developers, who don't make costly mistakes, because they just follow their tried & tested routines.
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