I am far away from Appleverse. Can anyone tell me few usecases for M1 EC2 instances?
Build automation, test automation.
Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances
201–210 of 269 posts
Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
After my experience 3 years ago, I will never use them again. I priced out an instance that estimated around $30/month via their calculator. Instance is indeed around $30 for the first 2 months, then I get a $200 bill. I don't know what the hell happened, but it was over 6x what I had budgeted. I tried to get someone to review my account, but I didn't get a response and just had to suck it up. I paid the $200 and mov…
I'm using Google Fi. Once I exceed my paid for bandwidth level for a given month it notifies me. When I go 50% over it notifies me a second time. If I want to know the bandwidth used I can check it anytime I want on my phone. Considering the huge amount of developers having problems of this kind how hard would it be for AWS to implement a similar system?
Google did this to me with Adwords. They gave me a "free" $200 to run a test campaign but it never turned off and I was not notified in anyway. They ended up charging me $800 for a completely test campaign for a non product blog website that ended up not even getting any traffic. Very scummy behavior even worse than AWS. It was basically extortion because I would have lost my entire Google account if I disputed the charges with my credit card.
Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm honestly at the point where I assume the AWS Console is awful on purpose as a way to drive people towards infrastructure as code. It's just so awful that it can't be on purpose (I hope).
Wait until they see how awful IaC is.
In what sense? Terraform is treating me quite well.
Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances
#204It’s an interesting look at AWS pricing since the cost of the M1 Mac Mini ($699) and it’s power consumption (avg 26 watts) are known. Based on hardware costs (significant) and power costs (insignificant) you’re looking at a hardware ROI at about 6 months from the $.65 per hour price. AWS has an estimated 60% gross profit margin, so from there it’s probably possible to estimate some other interesting things about thei…
There is other hardware in the stack. How much does that cost?
Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances
#205Every time I look at the AWS prices page or at its control panel, I feel like I need to get a special advanced degree to understand a thing.
You may not be that far off from the truth. It took me a paid course (though, admittedly at a deep discount and for basically no money for a professional) to understand the purpose of the VPC section of the AWS control panel. And a while later, to understand why the items on the left-hand side are grouped in such a seemingly nonsensical way.
Now that I know this complexity, I can't unlearn it. But for everyone else, I would just recommend Digital Ocean, Scaleway or Hetzner.
Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, the “let’s hook up your credit card to the Internet” part of cloud computing still makes me nervous.
Use a prepaid credit card. Boom. Protected
Google doesn't allow prepaid cards last I checked. I tried to use a card from privacy.com and the Google form explicitly stated that you can't use prepaid cards.
Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just learned that I need to pay aws 400$ for last month. I was thinking it would be 50$.
It's a very special kind of evil. They can always argue it's your fault, because you haven't read something, you misunderstood something. There are even stories circulating of people who lost their life savings by mistake but the AWS team charitably decided they will forgive them just this time, how nice of them! Everybody knows it's complex to their advantage, they are not stupid - but they can always defend themsel…
I was actually successfully in reversing a $500 AWS bill. I had needed an Active Directory domain controller so I found one in the AWS marketplace and deployed it to an EC2 instance. Well guess what, the DC must have had some malicious start up scripts in it because it proceeded to download a few TBs of data from outside to the AWS EC2 instance which equaled nearly $500. I complained and AWS immediately reversed it without any need to escalate. This was on a personal AWS account so no relation to any large organization. Morale of the story, dont trust AWS marketplace images from sketchy sources.
Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances
#208Every time I look at the AWS prices page or at its control panel, I feel like I need to get a special advanced degree to understand a thing.
After my experience 3 years ago, I will never use them again. I priced out an instance that estimated around $30/month via their calculator. Instance is indeed around $30 for the first 2 months, then I get a $200 bill. I don't know what the hell happened, but it was over 6x what I had budgeted. I tried to get someone to review my account, but I didn't get a response and just had to suck it up. I paid the $200 and mov…
There goes a call for thousands of MBA hacks to slither into this mess and create more mess and call it "value creation"
Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
Other providers let users put billing limits on their accounts. Seems like Amazon benefits when users aren't able to put a $30 a month limit on their accounts like the OP wanted to.
You are just making stuff up. AWS has all those things. Billing limits. Cost monitoring. It is all there.
AWS does not have billing limits.
Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are entire consulting businesses based on the idea of helping people understand their AWS bill. But I'm not sure what the tradeoff is. They have a lot of services with a lot of options. The pricing is designed to meet everyone's needs.
One thing that would make a difference on small accounts is the ability to do prepaid billing only. That way you define your budget in advance and they enforce it. The problem with the current billing is that people who are new to the system have no hope of understanding what is going on and they have to accept the open-ended nature of the billing system to learn.
One issue is what gets shut down when you hit the max? If you have an EC2 instance running and you hit the max, do they shut it off? Would customers understand that and be ok with it? What if you have an S3 bucket? Should they just delete the data? That's probably not what you want.
You can basically do max bill now -- you can set up a cloud watch alarm for billing and when it reaches a certain price, run a script. Your script could just shut everything down and delete everything, or do whatever is appropriate for your account. That's their solution to this.
Also they don't have instant feedback on usage -> cost. They batch process it. So if you get a huge spike in usage, AWS may not even know that for a while. They could in theory be willing to eat the cost of usage between it happening and their processing, but are probably unwilling.