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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

#241

Post by rmbyrro »

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…

The main question to me is: how the hell could two Open Search domains cost +$1k a month in the first place!?

AWS prices are ridiculous. I pay OVH $18/mo for a 4-core, 32 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD dedicated server. The cheapest on AWS would be r6g.xlarge, which costs $145/mo. Almost 10x.

Yes, AWS hardware is usually better, but they give me 4 "vCPUs". OVH gives me 4 "real" CPU cores. There's a LOT of difference. E even if my processor is worse than AWS', I still prefer 4 real CPUs than virtual ones, which are overbooked by AWS and rarely give me 100% of their power.

OVH gives me 300 Mbit, while r6g.xlarge gives "up to" 10 Gbit. But still, 10x? 300 Mbit gives me ~37 mb/s. I use a CDN for large stuff: HTML, images, JS, anyways...

There are certainly cases where AWS is the go-to option, but I think it's a small minority where it actually makes sense.

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

#242

Post by babuskov »

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…

Vultr has hard limits by default.

Hetzner also for CPU use, and last time I checked the traffic would drop to slower bandwidth if you pass some limit. I think they still charge you, though.

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

#244

Post by TheDong »

calgoo wrote: post #43
reddalo wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You can set up daily or hourly cost and usage reports on the account. I built a finops function based on it, feeding the data into a Postgres db. Make sure to select incremental updates, if not you’ll en up paying for tb of s3 storage.

"daily or hourly" isn't enough though.

There's some AWS resources, like for example route53 hosted zones, which bill only once at the end of the month, and so a daily or hourly bill won't tell you anything about leaked resources there.

There's at least a one resource that only bills once a year, so yet again you won't catch those with even monthly usage reports.

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

#245

Post by cube00 »

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.

When it's their money Azure manage to have a spending limit...

> The spending limit in Azure prevents spending over your credit amount. [1]

Once it's your money miraculously the spending limit is no longer available...

> The spending limit isn’t available for subscriptions with commitment plans or with pay-as-you-go pricing. [1]

[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cost-management-bill...

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

#246

Post by ayewo »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #219
Aeolun wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Also be aware it's not all roses with Hetzner.

There are stories online of folks getting their accounts deactivated or not even getting approved.

https://x.com/theo/status/1827480999305118135

https://x.com/heyandras/status/1856747621962191126

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

#247

Post by mewpmewp2 »

ayewo wrote: post #246
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Also be aware it's not all roses with Hetzner. There are stories online of folks getting their accounts deactivated or not even getting approved. https://x.com/theo/status/1827480999305118135 https://x.com/heyandras/status/1856747621962191126

I was able to buy a 8 vCPU instance right now - do you know how frequent this problem may be?

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

#248

Post by GTP »

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

But not all applications are critical, and the company deploying those applications should be able to differentiate between what's critical and what's not. If they're unable to, that's their fault. If there's no option to set hard limits, that's AWS' fault.

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

#249

Post by infecto »

phatfish wrote: post #86
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've only used Azure and it looks like ECS is equivelent to Azure Container Apps. I found their consumption model to be very cheap for doing dev/test. Not sure what it is like for larger workloads. Charing per deployment sounds crazy though.

Yes I believe that is the equivalent to ACA. I use ECS in prod and its incredibly cheap and efficient. Like all things it requires a little legwork to make sure its the best fit. They just charge for the underlying machines not the deployment itself.

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

#250

Post by sokoloff »

spacebanana7 wrote: post #165
throw2343223434 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If a company chooses to be run by accounting rather than by tech, that's fine; they should get the good and the bad outcomes that come from that choice.
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