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

elliott-king.github.io

281–290 of 293 posts

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

#282
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that automatic billing is something that cloud providers invented. For example, home Internet providers or mobile providers usually use prepaid plans, where they simply stop the service once you ran out of money (but you can connect your card account if you trust them). So you cannot get charged arbitrary amount for home Internet, and for mobile unless you travel.

Landline phone companies were always usage-based billing where you could run up huge bills by, say, making an international phone call for an hour.

Yep. In 1995 my parents bought me my first PC after years of begging. We lived in a very rural area with no local dial-up provider. I eventually was able to connect and was having a blast on message boards until my parents got a $350 phone bill, which is $750 in 2024 dollars. Turns out I had been using a long-distance number.

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

#283
I'm on the AWS Amplify team and wanted to give folks an update. First off, definitely empathize with the pain that Elliot went through. The referenced blog post is part of our advanced extensibility documentation, which covers how customers can use AWS CDK to add features that are not directly supported by the Amplify tooling, such as integrating with OpenSearch. Our initial OpenSearch extensibility documentation did not include the removalPolicy config, which led to the issues Elliot experienced. To mitigate this, we updated our documentation to include `removalPolicy: RemovalPolicy.DESTROY` for all stateful extensibility resources, ensuring they are cleaned up when the stack is deleted. Additionally, we will be updating the default behavior for `npx ampx sandbox` and `npx ampx pipeline-deploy` to apply this removal policy.

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

#284

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.…

If you don't actually need colocation for your side project, looks like you could buy an i7-11700k, 64 GB of DDR4, a motherboard, and a 512 GB NVMe drive for ~$430. That's looking at new parts on amazon. You might be able to do better with e.g. ebay.

You mean I would host at home? I like the idea however I maybe should get a separate internet package for that purpose I think, as to not mess with what I do at home.

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

#285
I remember my first usage of S3 close to its initial launch. It was the first time I came across the very concept of pay-as-you-go. I remember being anxious about unexpected charges and the forum was full of people begging for a cost cap feature.

That was 18(!) years ago. It's still nowhere to be found.

There's like 17 ways to do analysis, some of them paid, but none address the actual problem of capping a bill. It's pure malice.

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

#286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... only governments, yet this is Amazon

If it wasn't clear, my point is: Amazon is so big and dominant at this point that it's got government-like powers.

It wasn't clear, thanks

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

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You trust the government far too much. Regulated industries always end up costing the consumer more. See: medical care and education for examples.

One of the most American things you’ll ever hear. No, regulation doesn’t cost more. In Germany education is essentially free (yes, I know, we pay it from taxes — it costs German taxpayers less than it costs American students). Healthcare kind of the same: we pay for insurance and then only occasionally have co-payments for extras, but costs again are much lower than in USA.

Funny how no one these days says, “in the uk healthcare is free”. I wonder how much longer till “x in Germany” falls in that bracket.

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

#288
post #63
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

TB of S3 storage is surprisingly inexpensive though. Especially compared to everything else AWS.

$283/TB-year doesnt strike me as inexpensive. And that price does not include any data transfer.

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

#289
post #37

unrelated rant, but I'm still salty about it. needed to send "raw" http requests instead of using their bloated sdk for reasons, and requests failed with "content-type: application/json" header, but succeeded with "content-type: application/x-amz-json-1.0". get out of here with that nonsense.

I feel this way about pretty much every aspect of AWS I have touched in my career. Overly bloated, overly complex or weird home brew implementation for no clear gain.

In some cases (cough javascript sdk) you can literally feel the fear of being fired from the people who were writing these services.

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

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> There's no way to implement a hard limit without ... I don't believe that for a minute. You know why ? Let's turn it on its head. What happens if the credit card on your AWS account expires or is frozen ? You think AWS are going to continue letting you rack up money with no card to charge against ? I betcha they'll freeze your AWS assets the nanosecond they can't get a charge against the card. The mechanism for cus…

From experience they will let you spend tens of thousands of dollars a month without a valid payment method.

Like many times more than you've ever even spent with them.

I mean it's like 6 months of that before you even get your first non-standard form email.

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