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A $1k AWS mistake

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161–170 of 281 posts

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#161
This wouldn’t have specifically helped in this situation (EC2 reading from S3), but on the general topic of preventing unexpected charges from AWS:

AWS just yesterday launched flat rate pricing for their CDN (including a flat rate allowance for bandwidth and S3 storage), including a guaranteed $0 tier. It’s just the CDN for now, but hopefully it gets expanded to other services as well.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45975411

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#162
post #37

These sort of things show up about once a day between the three big cloud subreddit. Often with larger amounts And it’s always the same - clouds refuse to provide anything more than alerts (that are delayed) and your only option is prayer and begging for mercy. Followed by people claiming with absolute certainty that it’s literally technically impossible to provide hard capped accounts to tinkerers despite there bein…

AWS just released flat-rate pricing plans with no overages yesterday. You opt into a $0, $15, or $200/mo plan and at the end of the month your bill is still $0, $15, or $200.

It solves the problem of unexpected requests or data transfer increasing your bill across several services.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/networking-and-content-delivery...

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would put $100 that within 6 months of that, we'll get a post on here saying that their startup is gone under because AWS deleted their account because they didn't pay their bill and didn't realise their data would be deleted. > (the cap should be a rate, not a total) this is _way_ more complicated than there being a single cap.

> I would put $100 that within 6 months of that, we'll get a post on here saying that their startup is gone under because AWS deleted their account because they didn't pay their bill and didn't realise their data would be deleted. The cap can be opt-in.

> The cap can be opt-in.

People will opt into this cap, and then still be surprised when their site gets shut down.

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#164

This happens so often that the S3 VPC endpoint should be setup by default when your VPC is created. AWS engineers on here - make this happen. Also, consider using fck-nat ( https://fck-nat.dev/v1.3.0/ ) instead of NAT gateways unless you have a compelling reason to do otherwise, because you will save on per-Gb traffic charges. (Or, just run your own Debian nano instance that does the masquerading for you, which every…

[deleted]

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#165
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason to not include the endpoint by default is because VPCs should be secure by default. Everything is denied and unless you explicitly configure access to the Internet, it's unreachable. An attacker who manages to compromise a system in that VPC now has a means of data exfiltration in an otherwise air gapped set up. It's annoying because this is by far the more uncommon case for a VPC, but I think it's the rig…

There’s zero reason why AWS can’t pop up a warning if it detects this behavior though. It should clearly explain the implications to the end user. I mean EKS has all sorts of these warning flags it pops up on cluster health there’s really no reason why they can’t do the same here.

I am 100% in agreement, they could even make adding endpoints part of the VPC creation wizard.

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#166

This happens so often that the S3 VPC endpoint should be setup by default when your VPC is created. AWS engineers on here - make this happen. Also, consider using fck-nat ( https://fck-nat.dev/v1.3.0/ ) instead of NAT gateways unless you have a compelling reason to do otherwise, because you will save on per-Gb traffic charges. (Or, just run your own Debian nano instance that does the masquerading for you, which every…

AWS is not going to enable S3 endpoints by default, and most of the thread is downvoting the correct explanations like thinking in terms of a small hobby VPC, not the architectures AWS actually has to support.

Why it should not be done:

1. It mutates routing. Gateway Endpoints inject prefix-list routes into selected route tables. Many VPCs have dozens of RTs for segmentation, TGW attachments, inspection subnets, EKS-managed RTs, shared services, etc. Auto-editing them risks breaking zero-trust boundaries and traffic-inspection paths.

2. It breaks IAM / S3 policies. Enterprises commonly rely on aws:sourceVpce, aws:SourceIp, Private Access Points, SCP conditions, and restrictive bucket policies. Auto-creating a VPCE would silently bypass or invalidate these controls.

3. It bypasses security boundaries. A Gateway Endpoint forces S3 traffic to bypass NAT, firewalls, IDS/IPS, egress proxies, VPC Lattice policies, and other mandatory inspection layers. This is a hard violation for regulated workloads.

4. Many VPCs must not access S3 at all. Air-gapped, regulated, OEM, partner-isolated, and inspection-only VPCs intentionally block S3. Auto-adding an endpoint would break designed isolation.

5. Private DNS changes behavior. With Private DNS enabled, S3 hostname resolution is overridden to use the VPCE instead of the public S3 endpoint. This can break debugging assumptions, routing analysis, and certain cross-account access patterns.

6. AWS does not assume intent. The VPC model is intentionally minimal. AWS does not auto-create IGWs, NATs, Interface Endpoints, or egress paths. Defaults must never rewrite user security boundaries.

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#167
post #116
post #37

These sort of things show up about once a day between the three big cloud subreddit. Often with larger amounts And it’s always the same - clouds refuse to provide anything more than alerts (that are delayed) and your only option is prayer and begging for mercy. Followed by people claiming with absolute certainty that it’s literally technically impossible to provide hard capped accounts to tinkerers despite there bein…

These topics are not advanced...they are foundational scenarios covered in any entry level AWS or AWS Cloud third-party training. But over the last few years, people have convinced themselves that the cost of ignorance is low. Companies hand out unlimited self-paced learning portals, tick the “training provided” box, and quietly stop validating whether anyone actually learned anything. I remember when you had to spen…

If I accept your premise (which I think is overstated) I’d say it’s a good thing. We used to ship software with literally 100lbs of manual and sell expensive training, and then consulting when they messed up. Tons of perverse incentives.

The expectation that it just works is mostly a good thing.

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#168
I did this when I was ~22 messing with infra for the first time. A $300 bill in two days when I had $2000 in the bank really stung. I love AWS for many things, but I really wish they made the cost calculations transparent for beginners.

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#169

I did this when I was ~22 messing with infra for the first time. A $300 bill in two days when I had $2000 in the bank really stung. I love AWS for many things, but I really wish they made the cost calculations transparent for beginners.

I wonder why they don't...

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#170
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say that was irony. BTW you can of course self-host k8s, or dokku, or whatnot, and have as easy a deployment story as with the cloud. (But not necessarily as easy a maintenance story for the whole thing.)

> But not as easy a maintenance story That's my whole point. Zero maintenance. For a tinkerer who's focused on the infra, then sure, hosting your own can make sense. But for anyone who's focused on literally anything else, it doesn't make any sense.

I have found Claude Code is a great help to me. Yes, I can and have tinkered a lot over the decades, but I am perfectly happy letting Claude drive the system administration, and advise on best practices. Certainly for prototype configurations. I can install CC on all VPSes and local machines. NixOS sounds great, but the learning curve is not fun. I installed the CC package from the NixOS unstable channel and I don't have to learn the funky NixOS packaging language. I do have to intervene sometimes as the commands go by, as I know how to drive, so maybe not a solution for true newbies. I can spend a few hours learning how to click around in one of the cloud consoles, or I can let CC install the command line interfaces and do it for me. The $20/mo plan is plenty for system administration and if I pick the haiku model, then CC runs twice as fast on trivial stuff like system administration.
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