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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

#231

Post by cdchn »

oliwarner wrote: post #171
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…

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…

Cost Anomaly alerts do exactly this.

You can't even setup Cloudwatch alerts on your actual spend, the only metric available to you is "EstimatedCharges".

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

#233

Post by rolandog »

exhilaration wrote: post #212
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.

Completely agree. Having worked previously for ... (humans?) ... I can authoritatively theorize it would be fixed in a jiffy if it weren't making them bucketloads of money.

To make my case: just ponder the opposite: "What would an honest version of AWS do?". They would address the concerns publicly, document their progress towards fixing the issue, and even try to determine who was overcharged due to their faulty code, and offer them some compensation.

"We're too big to fix our own code" is, sadly, taken from the MS playbook (IIRC, something like that was made public after the breach of MS manager mailboxes after the whole Azure breach fiasco that was discovered by, IIRC, the DOJ that paid to have access to logs).

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

#235

Post by cdchn »

raverbashing wrote: post #142
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

Nowhere (serious) does billing limits work like this There's always a dunning period and multiple alerts

Then you go beyond that. Now what?

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

#236

Post by xyst »

rty32 wrote: post #218

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 IA…

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

Most people are forced to use AWS because CTO at their company was pushing a "wE mUsT shIp tO cLoUd" initiative. It's not out of choice, but out of survival.

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

#237

Post by cdchn »

Kwpolska wrote: post #177
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.

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.

Now multiply the logic required by multiple cost factors across hundreds of services.

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

#238

Post by joshstrange »

xmodem wrote: post #196
dncornholio wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I thought the point of deploying to the cloud using higher level services was so that I could worry about my app and stop worrying about the minutia of managing load balancers or database servers. Instead of interesting technical challenges I now get to worry about the minutia of Amazon's billing system. Neat! Where do I sign?

As with all things, you are trading away old problems for new ones. The question becomes: are the new problems easier for you to solve than the old ones?

There are parts of AWS that feel like magic and parts that cause me to bang my head against the wall, overall I like it more than it annoys me so I use AWS but it’s not a silver bullet and not all workloads make sense on AWS.

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

#239

Post by cdchn »

londons_explore wrote: post #187
__alexs wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They tell you in hourly increments for almost everything?

Even hourly isn't good enough. If I shut down some service, I want to know right now that nothing billable is left over. I don't want to have to wait an hour and come back and check only to find I forgot to clean up some IP address. Why can we not have a "billable items" dashboard which simply shows, globally, a list of all items in your account which are billable, and how much they will cost if left running for 1 mo…

There is, its called the Cost Explorer.

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

#240

Post by Kindling7257 »

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

I'm not trying to defend AWS, they are kinda shit, but deploying containers straight to EC2s is an extremely supported feature and it is very clear how to do it in the ECS admin panel https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonECS/latest/developerguide/...
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