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

161–170 of 293 posts

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

#161

Post by dncornholio »

akira2501 wrote: post #118
forgotoldacc wrote: post #13

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…

> I've been putting off digging into AWS for years now In my opinion people end up in these billing situations because they don't actually "dig in" to AWS. They make their pricing easily accessible, and while it's not always easy to understand, it is relatively easy to test as most costs scale nearly linearly. > the rational fear of waking up to massive charges. Stay away from the "wrapper" services. AWS Amplify, or…

Pretty ironic that you're actually listing more things why I would not use AWS at all. You mention: "stay away from", "ensure that you", "reasonable caching", "bandwidth is the only real nightmare" are all huge red flags.

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

#162

Post by dragandj »

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…

And yet most people swarm around AWS and similar providers like there is no tomorrow despite this barrier for adoption. People ARE irrational...

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

#163

Post by antonhag »

AWS has good base building blocks (ALB, EC2, Fargate, RDS, IAM etc). But it takes knowledge to put the pieces together. Thus AWS tries to create services/tools that orchestrate the base blocks (Amplify, Beanstalk) for you, which in my experience always becomes a mess where you don't actually understand what you are running in your cloud setup.

I'd recommend either learning the basic building blocks (these skills also transfers well to other clouds and self hosting) or using a higher level service provider than AWS (Vercel etc) - they do it better than AWS.

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

#164

Post by codedokode »

jclulow wrote: post #146
codedokode wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that automatic billing is something that cloud providers invented. For example, home Internet providers or mobile providers usually use prepaid plans, where they simply stop the service once you ran out of money (but you can connect your card account if you trust them). So you cannot get charged arbitrary amount for home Internet, and for mobile unless you travel.

Is that true? All of my Internet and mobile telephone service is post-paid with automatic billing. I know one can get prepaid plans from some providers, but how are you arriving at "usually"?

It means in your country people trust companies more than in mine. We use pre-paid system and optionally you can connect a card account for automatic billing (but the company cannot charge a card if there is no money left).

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

#165

Post by spacebanana7 »

throw2343223434 wrote: post #145
spacebanana7 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But the presence of a feature does not mean it has to be used?

The accounting teams of many orgs would want this feature to be enabled, but the tech teams wouldn't. Asking AWS not to add this feature means the tech teams win the debate before it starts.

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

#166

Post by paulgb »

slyall wrote: post #159
paulgb wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 breach…

> 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.

Sort of related, another wishlist feature I have is a way to start an EC2 instance with a deadline up front, and have the machine automatically suspended or terminated if it exceeds the deadline. I have some programs that start an EC2 instance, do some work, and shut it down (e.g. AMI building), and I would sleep a tiny bit better at night if AWS could deadline the instance as a backstop in case my script unexpectedly died before it could.

> Also you have variable costs (like s3 traffic)

Yeah, that's what I mean by it wouldn't solve the problem of usage-based billing. There they could just cut you off, and I think that's the bargain that people who want hard caps are asking for (there is always a spend cap at which I'd assume something had gone horribly wrong and would rather not keep spending), but I agree that the lack of real-time billing data is probably what stops them there.

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

#167

Post by whywhywhywhy »

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…

So have a “Starter” account with spend limits then, don’t understand how an individual is supposed to learn this stack and actually sleep at night without waking up panicking something has been left running.

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

#168

Post by benterix »

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.

People kept up bringing this argument since the very beginning when people already asked for this feature. This used to be the most upvoted request on AWS forums with AWS officially acknowledging (back in 2007 IIRC), "We know it's important for you and are working on it". But they made a decision not to implement it.

The details don't matter, really. For those who decide to set up a hard cap and agree to its terms, there could be a grace period or not. In the end, all instances would be shut down and all data lost, just like in traditional services when you haven't paid your bill so you are no longer entitled to them, pure and simple.

They haven't implemented and never will because Amazon is a company that is obsessed with optimization. There is negative motivation to implement anything related to that.

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

#169

Post by another-dave »

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…

> Almost no level of accidental spend is worth creating downtime or data loss in a critical application.

That feels like a bit of a red herring — if that was their ethos, then you'd _have_ to choose burstable/autoscaling config on every service. If I can configure a service to fall over rather than scale at a hard limit, that points to them understanding different their use cases (prod vs dev) and customer types (start-up vs enterprise).

Additionally, anytime I've worked for an enterprise customer, they've had a master service agreement set-up with AWS professional services rather than entering credit card info, so they could use that as a simple way to offer choices.

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

#170

Post by michaelsalim »

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.

Every so often, I'd get a random bill from AWS totaling to a few cents. No idea where it comes from and it's not worth the non trivial effort to find out about it. Just another reason I avoid AWS unless necessary.
Post reply on HN