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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

#211

Post by belter »

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

AWS Budget Actions: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cost-management/latest/userguide...

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

#212

Post by exhilaration »

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 been mentioned several time in HN comments that the AWS billing code is a giant pile of spaghetti and there is generally a lot of fear around making big changes to it.

That's been one of the more interesting inside baseball facts I've learned here.

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

#214

Post by traceroute66 »

weinzierl wrote: post #76
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 f…

> 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.

Actually there is a third category, those who care. I will grant you it is a rare category but it is there.

One example name: Exoscale[1]

Swiss cloud provider, they offer:

    (a) hard spend limits via account pre-pay balances (or you can also have post-pay if you want the "usual" cloud  "surprises included" payment model).
    (b) good customer service that doesn't hide behind "community forums"
Sure they don't offer all the bells and whisles range of services of the big names, but what they do do, they do well.

No I am not an Exoscale shill, and no I don't work for Exoscale. I just know some of their happy customers. :)

[1]https://www.exoscale.com/

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

#215

Post by modernerd »

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…

> If the original author had a $100/month limit he wouldn't have been able to spin up the stack even once.

Sounds perfect. Much better than having to negotiate your way out of a $1000 bill you don't expect to see.

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

#216

Post by p0w3n3d »

The repeating problem with cloud is that it no longer stops my bad code by OOM, rather the sky is the limit for both the memory and the cost. I heard funny story about people who bought badly written code which was constantly going up through the roof with resources. They got angry with my friend, told him the software is not bad, but the hosting is (software was bought with hardware from the manufacturer) and migrated to cloud, only to meet the hard iron hammer of karma (which in this case was embodied by high bill)

Also in my opinion billing is the new perf test but post factum and obscure, i.e. it is super easy to miss some key points in the development and then wake up with the costs falling down the responsibility sink (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41891694)

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

#217

Post by thinkharderdev »

krelian wrote: post #94

Cloud computing is ridiculously expensive. The other day I wanted to increase Mongo Atlas iops by 1000 on a 3 node cluster and it costs $3000 a year. How does that make any sense?

EBS pricing (and by extension anything the effectively bundles EBS) is absolutely insane.

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

#218

Post by rty32 »

One thing I find people don't talk enough about is how bad AWS documentation is, across the services. They contain outdated information about services, inconsistencies for the same feature, and lack explanation and meaningful examples to help you understand how things work and work together, even for common workflows. Example: try to make Sagemaker use EMR for Spark analysis, as a beginner who has little idea what IAM is and how to grant permissions for different services. It will be fun.

I am just amazed that people are able to navigate the services and configure them properly.

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

#219

Post by mewpmewp2 »

Aeolun wrote: post #175
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The droplet I have is 32 GB ram, 160 GB disk, 16 vCPUs (dedicated CPU, Regular Intel).

What would you suggest me instead?

I see Hetzner and maybe OVH could cost significantly less.

Actually looks like with Hetzner I would get better specs at 115 eur per month. With 16 vCP, 64GB ram, 360 GB SSD.

That's crazy, I didn't realize there's such a huge difference.

I think your comment is actually impressively valuable to me...

I'm going to bring it all over during the weekend. That's really exciting to find out much cheaper prices, because I've had disk space running out constantly on my DO. I do all my docker builds, files, databases and everything there as well. And for side projects I usually value all the cache and development speed as opposed to trying to optimize everything to take min performance and storage.

Also I spend way too much on Supabase. I think also $300+/month and increasing, I will bring that over and self host with a large SSD. I think at this point I prefer self hosting a postgres anyway to Supabase. I just tried it for a while, but the costs started going up.

Thank you so much.

Edit: there's some limits in Hetzner initially, so it might take few months before I can actually migrate.

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

#220

Post by rty32 »

Frieren wrote: post #98
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…

Regulate it. Asking Amazon to do something makes little sense. Create laws that force Amazon, and all the rest, to respect their users money. By default, corporations will do what makes them money, not what is ethical or good for the economy.

Not going to happen in the US for the next few years, at least.

Jeff Bezos killed the endorsement because he wanted Trump to win. Trump will return the favor.

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