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A $1k AWS mistake

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21–30 of 281 posts

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#21
post #12

> AWS charges $0.09 per GB for data transfer out to the internet from most regions, which adds up fast when you're moving terabytes of data. How does this actually work? So you upload your data to AWS S3 and then if you wish to get it back, you pay per GB of what you stored there?

[deleted]

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#22
post #12

> AWS charges $0.09 per GB for data transfer out to the internet from most regions, which adds up fast when you're moving terabytes of data. How does this actually work? So you upload your data to AWS S3 and then if you wish to get it back, you pay per GB of what you stored there?

the statement is about aws in general, and yes, you pay for bandwith

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#23
post #12

> AWS charges $0.09 per GB for data transfer out to the internet from most regions, which adds up fast when you're moving terabytes of data. How does this actually work? So you upload your data to AWS S3 and then if you wish to get it back, you pay per GB of what you stored there?

Yes…?

Egress bandwidth costs money. Consumer cloud services bake it into a monthly price, and if you’re downloading too much, they throttle you. You can’t download unlimited terabytes from Google Drive. You’ll get a message that reads something like: “Quota exceeded, try again later.” — which also sucks if you happen to need your data from Drive.

AWS is not a consumer service so they make you think about the cost directly.

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#24

Ah, the good old VPC NAT Gateway. I was lucky to have experienced all of the same mistakes for free (ex-Amazon employee). My manager just got an email saying the costs had gone through the roof and asked me to look into it. Feel bad for anyone that actually needs to cough up money for these dark patterns.

Personally I don't even understand why NAT gateways are so prevalent. What you want most of the time is just an Internet gateway.

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#25

NAT gateway probably cheap as fuck for Bezos & co to run but nice little earner. The parking meter or exit ramp toll of cloud infra. Cheap beers in our bar but $1000 curb usage fee to pull up in your uber.

I don't think its about profits, its about incentivising using as many AWS products as possible. Consider it an 'anti-lock-in fee'

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#26

NAT gateway probably cheap as fuck for Bezos & co to run but nice little earner. The parking meter or exit ramp toll of cloud infra. Cheap beers in our bar but $1000 curb usage fee to pull up in your uber.

[deleted]

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#27
post #13

I made the same mistake and blew $60k. I have never understood why the S3 endpoint isn't deployed by default, except to catch people making this exact mistake.

Thats a year salary but hey think about how much more complicated your work would be if you had to learn to self-host your infra!

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#28
post #23
post #12

> AWS charges $0.09 per GB for data transfer out to the internet from most regions, which adds up fast when you're moving terabytes of data. How does this actually work? So you upload your data to AWS S3 and then if you wish to get it back, you pay per GB of what you stored there?

Yes…? Egress bandwidth costs money. Consumer cloud services bake it into a monthly price, and if you’re downloading too much, they throttle you. You can’t download unlimited terabytes from Google Drive. You’ll get a message that reads something like: “Quota exceeded, try again later.” — which also sucks if you happen to need your data from Drive. AWS is not a consumer service so they make you think about the cost dir…

"Premium bandwidth" which AWS/Amazon markets to less understanding developers is almost a scam. By now, software developers think data centers, ISPs and others part of the peering on the internet pay per GB transferred, because all the clouds charge them like that.

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#29
post #7

Does Amazon refund you for mistakes, or do you have to land on HN frontpage for that to happen?

Depends on various factors and of course the amount of money in question. I've had AWS approve a refund for a rather large sum a few years ago, but that took quite a bit of back and forth with them.

Crucial for the approval was that we had cost alerts already enabled before it happened and were able to show that this didn't help at all, because they triggered way too late. We also had to explain in detail what measures we implemented to ensure that such a situation doesn't happen again.

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#30
post #12

> AWS charges $0.09 per GB for data transfer out to the internet from most regions, which adds up fast when you're moving terabytes of data. How does this actually work? So you upload your data to AWS S3 and then if you wish to get it back, you pay per GB of what you stored there?

That is the business model and one of the figurative moats: easy to onboard, hard/expensive (relative to on-boarding ) to divest.

Though important to note in this specific case was a misconfiguration that is easy to make/not understand in the data was not intended to leave AWS services (and thus should be free) but due to using the NAT gateway, data did leave the AWS nest and was charged at a higher data rate per GB than if just pulling everything straight out of S3/EC2 by about an order of magnitude (generally speaking YMMV depending on region, requests, total size, if it's an expedited archival retrieval etc etc)

So this is an atypical case, doesn't usually cost $1000 to pull 20TB out of AWS. Still this is an easy mistake to make.

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