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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

#121

Post by duckmysick »

normie3000 wrote: post #49
bdcravens wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Automated secrets scanning is one of them. You can do it as a pre-commit hook. GitHub and Gitlab can scan it too.

https://docs.github.com/en/code-security/secret-scanning/int...

https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/application_security/secret_...

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

#122

Post by tonetegeatinst »

_bare_metal wrote: post #90
devoutsalsa wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bare metal server with unmetered bandwidth.

Indeed. Shameless plug of a toy I built that lets you see the price difference : https://baremetalsavings.com

Love the tool and UI you built. I homelab and while not always on 24/7 its way more affordable to run on my own bare metal than pay a cloud provider. I also get super fast local speeds.

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

#123

Post by soup10 »

lukeramsden wrote: post #104
soup10 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spend limits are such an obvious and necessary feature that the only reason they don't have them is shady business practices.

Not really. Do you think that this is trivial at AWS scale? What do you do when people hit their hard spend limits, start shutting down their EC2 instances and deleting their data? I can see the argument that just because its "hard" doesn't mean they shouldn't do it, but it's disingenuous to say they're shady because they don't.

set a policy for what happens when the spend limit is reached? not rocket science

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

#124

Post by jeroenhd »

urbandw311er wrote: post #67
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.

Didn't you know, Amazon owns JSON? They acquired it this week, please update all your Content-Type headers within 12 months otherwise you will be in violation of their IP holdings.

If they use a non-standard version of JSON (for example, one supporting comments, or one with rules about duplicate keys, or any other rule that's not part of the underspecified JSON spec) they should use a custom content type. Something can be valid JSON but invalid AmazJSON and this is exactly how you would distinguish between the two.

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

#125

Post by dkersten »

phatfish wrote: post #86
dkersten wrote: post #71

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 tw…

I've only used Azure and it looks like ECS is equivelent to Azure Container Apps. I found their consumption model to be very cheap for doing dev/test. Not sure what it is like for larger workloads. Charing per deployment sounds crazy though.

> Charging per deployment sounds crazy though.

I think technically I was just being charged for the container host machine, but while each individual deploy only lasted a minute or so, I was being charged the minimum each time. And each new deploy started a new host machine. Something like that anyway, it was a few years ago, so I don't remember the specifics.

So I can understand why, but it doesn't change that if their logging hadn't been so flaky, I should have been able to fix the issue in minutes with minimal cost, like I did on Digital Ocean. Besides, the $100 they charged me doesn't include the much more expensive two days I wasted on it.

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

#126

Post by mewpmewp2 »

theanonymousone wrote: post #73
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.

I've also shot myself in the foot with various APIs, e.g. I racked a 3k bill in a month with Google APIs for my side project, just because I wasn't checking the usage, I didn't think I was using that much. This is more of my fault I guess, but luckily support waived that fee for me after some back and forth. Also I'm not from the US so this bill is larger for me compared to US folks. But honestly also Google APIs are pretty expensive. For hosting my side projects I use a single dedicated DO droplet for $320 a month, where I have 40+ docker containers.

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

#128

Post by bambax »

tonetegeatinst wrote: post #122
_bare_metal wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. Shameless plug of a toy I built that lets you see the price difference : https://baremetalsavings.com

Love the tool and UI you built. I homelab and while not always on 24/7 its way more affordable to run on my own bare metal than pay a cloud provider. I also get super fast local speeds.

> I homelab

Didn't know there was a verb for it! I "homelab" too and so far am very happy. With a (free) CDN in front of it it can handle spikes in traffic (that are rare anyways), and everything is simple and mostly free (since the machines are already there).

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

#129

Post by slyall »

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…

Dear Customer,

You have reached your Configured Maximum Monthly Spend Limit.

As per your settings we have removed all objects from S3, All RDS Databases, All Route53 Domains, all ESB volumes, all elastic IPs, All EC2 instances and all Snapshots.

Please update your spend limit before you recreate the above.

Yours, AWS

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