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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

#251

Post by ionwake »

I remember checking with and calling an amazon rep on the phone - he assured me I could use one of the "heavier" graphic card instances and would only be charged per minute usage at the rates shown.

I ran it for 1 minute expecting to be paying the $5 or whatever it was per minute and was charged around $100 for it to "boot up". Cancelled it. Never trusted amazon billing again = (

Bezos keeps waxing lyrical in all his interviews on how he "tests" his company services by calling them on the phone to make sure the SLAs or whatever are accurate. But they aren't. TBH I was kind of confused how proud he was that it took 10 mins to get through to someone on the phone instead of 1 minute or something, on how they noticed it and had to "rearrange" things. Like wtf, I would have fired ALL of my executive below me if such an egregious false advertising existed. It can't be that bloody hard as one of the richest people on the planet to just pay some dude $5 an hour to make sure services are billed as expected, run as expected.

I am sorry to complain, I know they have all done great jobs, but it makes me wonder whether I would be "out of touch" if I was ever in a C-suite role. From what I see around me, I definately would be. But maybe those margins don't matter?

I honestly am confused after decades in IT why management is never held responsible. If I ran a company mgmt would be the FIRST to be fired if there were any issues. I swear I read a comment on HN once from a manager saying why should they be held responsible if there is a fuck up lower down the chain, I was like wtf, the whole point of being a manager is to be RESPONSIBLE. Management isnt a luxury "earn the big bucks" because Im better than everyone else, and thus should be protected.

The easiest way to diagnose this as a CEO is to see how often MGMT have been let go at different tiers, and if there havent been any, well there must be a form of corruption / nepotism occuring.

Been burnt as a "small" entrepeneur by all of the greats, Google ( shutting down my instance when it went viral because I decided to upgrade the hosting which for some unknown reason mean it had to be shutdown WITHOUT warning for 24 hours, possibly to transfer it or something god knows. AWS etc.

I know it might seem like a small gripe, but as a millionaire now I remember how I was treated by these companies.

Maybe I should just be grateful I could use them at all.

I think I'm just saying its crazy how the "low" b2b customer is treated when it would be so cheap to just make sure these collosal fuck ups don't happen.

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

#252

Post by oliwarner »

cdchn wrote: post #231
oliwarner wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Which is great if you understand them and set them up. The post here is an experience following an Amazon tutorial and without expecting it, ending up $$$ in debt.

Again, Amazon isn't stepping up to protect users from themselves. They could do a lot more.

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

#253

Post by Terretta »

traceroute66 wrote: post #208
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…

> Hard spend limits are an anti-feature for enterprise customers Yada yada yada, that's the same old excuse the cloud providers trot out. Now, forgive me for my clearly Nobel Prize winning levels of intellect when I point out the following... Number one: You would not have to turn on the hard spend limit if such functionality were to be provided. Number two: You could enable customers to set up hard limits IN CONJUNC…

There's no way to implement a hard limit without getting in the middle of your system in ways that (a) alter the system design, (b) in ways you cannot correct for, and (c) not for the better.

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

#254

Post by Terretta »

another-dave wrote: post #169
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…

> 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 (sta…

A service doesn't just "fall over" at a limit. There has to be other machinery to limit it.

Given that all your usage and traffic other than that at the limit request should not be gated or limited, why would you want someone else injecting additional complexity and bottleneck risk inline?

Determine your own graceful envelope, implement accordingly.

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

#255

Post by another-dave »

Terretta wrote: post #254
another-dave wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 (sta…

A service doesn't just "fall over" at a limit. There has to be other machinery to limit it. Given that all your usage and traffic other than that at the limit request should not be gated or limited, why would you want someone else injecting additional complexity and bottleneck risk inline? Determine your own graceful envelope, implement accordingly.

The OP was saying that having any spending limit would be antithetical to enterprise usage because it could bring critical services to a halt.

My point was, if that's a reason to have unbounded spending, why allow me to spin up a service that can get CPU or RAM bound?

> Determine your own graceful envelope, implement accordingly.

Which most people do have, but we then also want an "ungraceful" backstop — trains have both a brake and a dead man's switch.

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

#256

Post by scott_w »

hnben wrote: post #110
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…

could you set a limit to the credit-card associated with the cloud service? Or would it still create costs after the limit has run out, which they would collect in other ways?

The latter: you've used the service so, even if your card rejected the payment, you'd still have a debt with your provider.

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

#257

Post by op00to »

theanonymousone wrote: post #73
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 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 use a visa gift card for AWS, I only risk what I have on the card.

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

#258

Post by op00to »

dcminter wrote: post #229
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 have a personal account that I'm meticulously careful about (but still terrified of). I also have an account with L̵i̵n̵u̵x̵A̵c̵a̵d̵e̵m̵y̵ A̵C̵l̵o̵u̵d̵G̵u̵r̵u̵ PluralSight: and while the courses are very variable (and mostly exam cramming focused) it has their Cloud Playground as a super nice feature. I get four hours to play around with setting things up and then it will all get automatically torn down for me. The…

I miss my ACG account. I feel like the sandbox more cost effective than the Wild West of my company’s sandbox aws account.

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

#259

Post by eddd-ddde »

op00to wrote: post #257
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 use a visa gift card for AWS, I only risk what I have on the card.

In that case you are risking getting perma banned if anything goes south and you end up not paying anyways.

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

#260

Post by cdchn »

oliwarner wrote: post #252
cdchn wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Which is great if you understand them and set them up. The post here is an experience following an Amazon tutorial and without expecting it, ending up $$$ in debt. Again, Amazon isn't stepping up to protect users from themselves. They could do a lot more.

They refunded him the money, without a lot of hassle. He toddled into a rough edge, bumped his head, Amazon made it better and apparently gave him a lollipop as well and sent him on his way. I think Amazon should get some credit here.
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