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A $1k AWS mistake

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251–260 of 281 posts

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#251
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes uploading into AWS is free/cheap. You pay per GB of data downloaded, which is not cheap. You can see why, from a sales perspective: AWS' customers generally charge their customers for data they download - so they are extracting a % off that. And moreover, it makes migrating away from AWS quite expensive in a lot of circumstances.

> And moreover, it makes migrating away from AWS quite expensive in a lot of circumstances. Please get some training...and stop spreading disinformation. And to think on this thread only my posts are getting downvoted.... "Free data transfer out to internet when moving out of AWS" - https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/free-data-transfer-out-to-i...

It's not disinformation at all, there's a lot of hurdles to this.

In the link you posted, it even says Amazon can't actually tell if you're leaving AWS or not so they're going to charge you the regular rate. You need explicit approval from them to get this 'free' data transfer.

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#252
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does a hard cap look like for EBS volumes? Or S3? RDS? Do you just delete when the limit is hit?

How about something like what runpod does? Shutdown ephemeral resources to ensure there's enough money left to keep data around for some time.

RunPod has its issues, but the way it handles payment is basically my ideal. Nothing brings peace of mind like knowing you won't be billed for more than you've already paid into your wallet. As long as you aren't obliged to fulfil some SLA, I've found that this on-demand scaling compute is really all I need in conjunction with a traditional VPS.

It's great for ML research too, as you can just SSH into a pod with VScode and drag in your notebooks and whatnot as if it were your own computer, but with a 5090 available to speed up training.

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#255
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…

The sad part about these posts is not the cloud apologists that show up in the comments. It’s the inevitable conclusion that “we should have understood our billing agreements better” or “we should really research what we’re deploying next time.” Nobody ever thinks, maybe the problem is the cloud itself. Maybe if I’m a single person business or have a few employees and even fewer users, then I should pay for infrastructure with a predictable cost…

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The documentation is thick but it has a common theme and format to it. So once you get the hang of finding the "juicy bits" you can usually locate them anywhere. The docs do generally warn you of these cases, or have a whole "best practices" section which highlights them directly. The key is, do not make decisions lightly in the cloud, just because something is easy to enable in the UI does not mean it's recommended.…

I am 100% not willing to put that much effort into it. Actually I am not willing to spend that much time reading "cloud" provider docs and best practices. What I care about is hosting services and getting the mission done. I value predictable and reasonable costs much more than "flexibility". In general whatever host I have ever used typically have "cloud" offerings too. So real services go to dedicated hosts, experi…

> Actually I am not willing to spend that much time reading "cloud" provider docs and best practices.

It doesn't take that much time just intentional reading to learn something new. Do you not read any docs?

> I value predictable and reasonable costs much more than "flexibility".

The point is that these aren't mutually exclusive.

> So real services go to dedicated hosts

And when it becomes overloaded, needs upgrading, or requires other maintenance? There's a problem I've completely left behind.

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#257
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, what measures you implemented ? How about AWS implements a hard cap, like everyone has been asking for forever?

>How about AWS implements a hard cap, like everyone has been asking for forever? s/everyone has/a bunch of very small customers have/

I am never going to use any cloud service which doesn't have a cap on charges. I simply cannot risk waking up and finding a $10000 or whatever charge on my personal credit card.

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#258
post #113

I'm still adamant about the fact that the "cloud" is a racket. Sure, it decreases the time necessary to get something up running, but the promises of cheaper/easier to manage/more reliable have turned out to be false. Instead of paying x on sysadmin salaries, you pay 5x to mega corps and you lose ownership of all your data and infrastructure. I think it's bad for the environment, bad for industry practices and bad fo…

I'd say it's a racket for enterprise but it makes sense for small things. For example, a friend of mine, who's in a decent bit of debt and hence on the hunt for anything that can make some money, wanted to try making essentially a Replika clone for a local market and being able to rent an H100 for 2$ an hour was very nice. He could mess around a bit, confirm it's way more work than he thought and move on to other ide…

But that is not what is usually referred to as the cloud. I am not against infrastructure for rent like VPS or an H100 node, but against the behemoths of AWS, Azure and the like

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#259
post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How about AWS implements a hard cap, like everyone has been asking for forever? s/everyone has/a bunch of very small customers have/

I am never going to use any cloud service which doesn't have a cap on charges. I simply cannot risk waking up and finding a $10000 or whatever charge on my personal credit card.

And for amazon that's probably fine, people paying with personal credit cards are not bringing in much money.

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#260
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…

This might be speaking the obvious, but I think that the lack of half-decent cost controls is not intentionally malicious. There is no mustache-twirling villain who has a great idea on how to !@#$ people out of their money. I think it's the play between incompetence and having absolutely no incentive to do anything about it (which is still a form of malice). I've used AWS for about 10 years and am by no means an expe…

> There is no mustache-twirling villain who has a great idea on how to !@#$ people out of their money.

Unfortunately, that's not correct. A multi-trillion dollar company most absolutely has not just such a person, but many departments with hundreds of people tasked with precisely that, maximizing revenue by exploting every dark pattern they can possibly think of.

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