Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

elliott-king.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 293 posts

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

#151

Post by tw04 »

spacebanana7 wrote: post #143
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…

Hard spend limits are an anti-feature for enterprise customers, who are the core customer of AWS. Almost no level of accidental spend is worth creating downtime or data loss in a critical application. Even having the option of a hard spend limit would be hazardous, because accounting teams might push the use of such tools, and thereby risk data loss incidents when problems happen. Hard spend limits might make sense f…

> Hard spend limits are an anti-feature for enterprise customers, who are the core customer of AWS. Almost no level of accidental spend is worth creating downtime or data loss in a critical application.

Great, so they don’t have to use the feature?

That excuse was a great excuse when AWS was an MVP for someone. 20+ years later… there is no excuse.

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

#152

Post by heavensteeth »

slyall wrote: post #129
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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

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

#153

Post by jeffparsons »

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.

At AWS engineering scale they can absolutely figure it out if they have the slightest interest in doing so. I've heard all the excuses — they all suck.

Businesses with lawyers and stuff can afford to negotiate with AWS etc. when things go wrong. Individuals who want to upskill on AWS to improve their job prospects have to roll the dice on AWS maybe bankrupting them. AWS actively encourages developers to put themselves in this position.

I don't know if AWS should be regulated into providing spending controls. But if they don't choose to provide spending controls of their own accord, I'll continue to call them out for being grossly irresponsible, because they are.

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

#154

Post by PaulRobinson »

te_chris wrote: post #114
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 gave up on AWS when I realised you can’t deploy a container straight to ec2 like you can on GCP. For bigger things, yeah the support’s better, for anything small to mid GCP all day. Primitives that actually make sense to how we use containers and such these days. And Bigquery

For containers, you don't want EC2, you want ECS, possibly even Fargate depending on your use case. They're different compute primitives based on your needs.

There isn't a boxed product like Bigquery, but the pieces are all there - DynamoDB, Athena, Quicksight...

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

#155

Post by _bare_metal »

presentation wrote: post #116
_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

If anything this makes me feel better since my workload doesn’t require very beefy machines and the amount id be saving is basically irrelevant compared to my labor costs.

Yes, bare metal is not a panacea. Some use cases require 0 personnel change going bare metal (even having reduced labor), and some are very much the opposite.

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

#156

Post by antonhag »

te_chris wrote: post #114
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 gave up on AWS when I realised you can’t deploy a container straight to ec2 like you can on GCP. For bigger things, yeah the support’s better, for anything small to mid GCP all day. Primitives that actually make sense to how we use containers and such these days. And Bigquery

For AWS the solution for container deployments (without dealing with VMs) is Fargate, which imo works reasonably well.

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

#157

Post by akvadrako »

reddalo wrote: post #34
davedx wrote: 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.

What about the billing dashboard? You can break it down by service and say CPU or memory, or tags if you use them. That has always given me good enough insight into where my client's money is being spent. I'm not sure it's totally realtime, but certainly daily.

BTW I'm a supporter of spending caps, not saying this should be the only way.

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

#159

Post by slyall »

paulgb wrote: post #139
slyall wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

A compromise solution to this could be to block creation of new resources if their monthly cost would exceed the monthly limit, unless the customer increases the limit. It wouldn’t solve the problem for usage-based billing, but it would have solved the problem here.

All sorts of problems there. It means that you can't spin up a stack for an hour if the system calculates that leaving it online for a whole month would breach your limit. If the original author had a $100/month limit he wouldn't have been able to spin up the stack even once.

Also you have variable costs (like s3 traffic) that could put you over your limit half way through the month. Then how does AWS stop you breaching your limit?

On a more practical level I don't think AWS keeps tracks of bills on a minute-by-minute basis.

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

#160

Post by vbezhenar »

HumanOstrich wrote: post #135
vbezhenar wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I encountered similar situation twice and AWS did not issue a refund both times. I'm avoiding AWS like plague now. Not going to rely on goodwill of support person handling my ticket today.

Care to share any details?

First time I've used S3 glacier in a wrong way and downloading few gigabytes resulted in multi-hundred dollars bill. I don't remember all the details, but it was absolutely non-obvious behaviour. I think it was corrected since then and today it wouldn't work like that.

Second time I've configured virtual machine with some fancy disk. It was supposed to work as CI build server, so I've chosen the fastest disk. Apparently this fastest disk was billed by IOPS or something like that, so it ate few thousands of dollars in a month. I couldn't even imagine disk could cost that much.

Basically these pricing nuances contradicted everything I ever encountered on multiple hosters I worked with and it felt like malicious traps designed specifically for people to fall into.

Post reply on HN