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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

#171

Post by oliwarner »

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…

Is every problem you see so insurmountable?

In the olden days if we spotted a customer ringing up a colossal bill, we would tell them. These huge Amazon bills are fast but still multiple days. They can trivially use rolling-projection windows to know when an account is having a massive spike.

They could use this foresight to call the customer, ensure they're informed, give them the choice about how to continue. This isn't atomic rocket surgery.

"Oh but profit" isn't an argument. They are thousands of dollars up before a problem occurs. The only money they lose is money gained through customer accident. Much of it forgiven to customers who cannot afford it. It's not happily spent. They can do better business.

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

#172

Post by vultour »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #167
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…

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.

By checking what resources you are spinning up and double checking everything has been removed after you're done. I have used AWS for small projects many times and have never been hit with a surprise bill. The platform is built for actual customers, not your hello world app.

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

#173

Post by benterix »

lucianbr wrote: post #148
lukeramsden wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Do you think that this is trivial at AWS scale? What a ridiculous point. AWS achieves non-trivial things at scale all the time, and brag about it too. So many smart engineers with high salaries and they can't figure out a solution like "shut down instances so costs don't continue to grow, but keep the data so nothing critical is lost, at least for a limited time"? Disingenuous is what you are writing - oh no, it's…

> Disingenuous is what you are writing - oh no, it's a hard problem, they can't be expected to even try to solve it.

I find it funny people bring this pseudo-argument up whenever this issue is discussed. Customers: "We want A, it's crucial for us". People on the Internet: "Do you have any idea how difficult is to implement A? How would it work?" And the discussion diverges into technical details obscuring the main point: AWS is bent on on never implementing this feature even though in the past (that is more than a decade ago) they promised they would do that.

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

#175

Post by Aeolun »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #126
theanonymousone wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

That’s still very expensive. At that point you’d be well served by going dedicated hardware.

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

#176

Post by Aeolun »

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…

They can shut it down where it makes sense and keep racking up charges for storage. It’s generally the compute that costs the most.

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

#177

Post by Kwpolska »

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.

They've had two decades to figure it out. For EC2, they could shut down the instance but keep storage and public IPs. It shouldn't be too hard to estimate when the instance has to be stopped to end up with charges below the hard limit.

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

#178

Post by ekidd »

vultour wrote: post #172
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

By checking what resources you are spinning up and double checking everything has been removed after you're done. I have used AWS for small projects many times and have never been hit with a surprise bill. The platform is built for actual customers, not your hello world app.

Being aware of everything you're running on AWS is trivial when it's all on the EC2 dashboard, and you create everything by hand or using Terraform.

Many of these new AWS-provided stacks, however, seem to create stuff all over your account.

The moral of the story? Don't ever use AWS tools like the one the OP describes, ones which create a bunch of different resources for you automatically.

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

#179

Post by another-dave »

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.

> What do you do when people hit their hard spend limits, start shutting down their EC2 instances and deleting their data?

Yes, why not? I don't see the problem here? If you didn't want that, you could set a higher spending limit.

If they want a little more user-friendly approach they could give you X hours grace.

> You've been above your spending limit for 4 hrs (200%), in 4 hrs your services will go into suspended state. Increase your spending limit to resume.

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

#180

Post by Aeolun »

benterix wrote: post #168
lukeramsden wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, t…

That, and AWS just doesn’t really care for people with a spending limit as their customers, which is entirely reasonable.

Just forgiving all the ridiculous bills is a much better (and cheaper) strategy.

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