Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

cloudirregular.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 457 posts

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#221

Post by perryizgr8 »

mjthompson wrote: post #152

Oracle - of all businesses - got this right. I know, I'm in shock too. In Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, after your credit is exhausted, you have to explicitly opt in to billing or else they stop all paid services for you. Moreover, you can choose to keep billing disabled and use their free services without fear of unknown costs. AWS have just decided to run with a policy of offering refunds when people make mistakes.…

Wow this is amazing! Never thought Oracle would have such a nice free tier.

> 2 Compute virtual machines with 1/8 OCPU and 1 GB memory each.

> 2 Block Volumes Storage, 100 GB total.

> 10 GB Object Storage.

> 10 GB Archive Storage.

> Resource Manager: managed Terraform.

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#222

Post by thayne »

grioghar wrote: post #151
twodave wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have to agree with the others. For example, while setting up ELB it's possible to select at least one option (un-checking the Public IP box) that causes the setup to just fail with a nonsensical error message. Turns out ELB requires a public IP to communicate with the nodes. That's just the most glaring one off the top of my head. I also remember trying to set up SFTP whenever it was first released. It was literally…

How are people not building in Terraform for an easy ‘destroy’ at the end? I know it’s rhetorical and a lesson learned myself, but yeah… I would expect folks to learn to use this tool to help manage costs this way.

terraform 'destroy' isn't infallible. There are certain resources that trigger the creation of other resources (for example, lambda functions will create cloudwatch log groups, and dynamodb tables create cloudwatch alarms) and when terraform destroys the resource, it doesn't necessarily clean up all the associated resources.

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#223

Post by bitexploder »

kempbellt wrote: post #202
thejosh wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why the f do I have to use a service like billgist to get a breakdown of my services? AWS billing IS complicated but could be made so much simpler...

I'll bite... Because, if you are a company that uses AWS at scale (deploying literally thousands of resources at a time), you care more about meeting demand and getting resources to spec, than you do about the cost of an individual elastic IP... The price of each individual resource isn't something that you want to see on every screen you touch. It literally clutters the console with information that you couldn't giv…

You also get much better negotiated rates for everything when you are big.

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#225

Post by hobs »

xtracto wrote: post #210
eric4smith wrote: post #6

Yup. Got charged over $800 for "experimenting" with a DynamoDB database and forgetting to delete it afterwards. Sure, I called customer support and they reversed the charges. But something the nice lady on the other end said as she chuckled: "This happens all the time". DigitalOcean is the worst with the dormant accounts. Just got dinged around $2.40 on my credit card. Going into DO I could not find what was causing…

I have a DO server thats been running for more rhan 5 years. It was the basic $5 bucks instance they offered at the time I felt a bit robbed a couple of days ago when I was spinning another instance and I saw that the newer $5 instance has more memory and more cpu power. I feel like they should have decreases the cost of the older less performant instance. I have been spoiled by my Internet provider who year after ye…

When they changed the pricing they emailed me and told me that I could effectively reprovision my machine to get the price difference, I think it was part of a rollout of some other infra as well.

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#226

Post by Romanulus »

therockspush wrote: post #220
nathanaldensr wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With all due respect, I think the issue here is that your company should not need to exist. Amazon should provide this feature as part of the UX.

Agreed. Nothing new about this request. It's like hiring a plane to fly over your house repeatedly to tell you whether or not it's on fire. There has to be a better way.

We have a tier for that, too!

Vantage: Plane View

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#227

Post by therockspush »

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #161
farnsworth wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS charges me $1 or $2 every month, and I log into my account and click through every page and can't find a single active service or any clue on what it's for. It's marked "EC2 - Other", whatever the f that means

Yeah, that's an elastic IP, check under EC2. People forget to clean them up after shutting down the instance (probably kept in case you want to keep your IP)

It's crazy that it's so common, but that they wouldn't make that obvious.

Considering the whole IPv4 extinction that's coming down and all.

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#228

Post by danielmeskin »

young_unixer wrote: post #214

Can anyone recommend a cloud provider that's suitable for learning (the opposite of AWS in this regard)?

Plain old Linux: Free: GCP

Paid (but cheap): Linode, DigitalOcean

—- Machine Learning:

Free: Google CoLab, Paperspace Gradient

Paid (but [relatively] cheap): JarvisLabs, DataCrunch

—- Databases and user auth:

Free: Firebase spark

Paid (but cheap, remember to set billing alerts!): Firebase blaze

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#229

Post by anonytrary »

Can confirm. Default ElastiCache clustering option chooses an extremely high compute node, I ended up accidentally spending $1300 in a month just for testing some Redis clustering script. The minimum option ends up only costing a few dozen dollars a month. The billing alert did not even trigger until the very end of the month, so I got a $1300 surprise. I complained about it to AWS, mentioning how misleading their shit was, and they ended up refunding me $800. Still -- a $500 mistake anyone could make at 11pm. They also made it extra clear in their response that they are not legally obligated to refund me, and that they were doing it out of the kindness of their hearts.

AWS console is some next level outdated shit that needs to be improved. GCP's console is way cleaner IMO. I really hope AWS fixed this after this happened to me, but somehow I doubt they did.

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#230

Post by ashneo76 »

AWS is not the cloud. There are others. Please try something else. As someone with extensive professional experience with it day in and out, it is overrated.

Also, the cloud is someone else's computer. It is either AWS or GCP or something else. Move to what works, for you.

Post reply on HN