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Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

cloudirregular.substack.com

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

#311

Post by CJefferson »

akerl_ wrote: post #30
throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #16

Oh come on. We all know that the 'accidental revenue' from the way Free Tier is set up probably makes up a cool 2 million or more annually. Plenty to justify its continued abuse of naive students. Why would they walk away from that cash? The only people they're pissing off is people who aren't using AWS anyway.

I’ve heard of plenty of people accidentally blasting past the free tier, or past dev credits, or other ways where they got burned by a surprise bill. 100% of those people have gotten a refund from AWS support by filing a ticket. AWS pretty clearly isn’t raking in money on this. Even at your imaginary 2 million a year, that’s a drop in the bucket for AWS, let alone Amazon.

I did that, I didn't get a refund. Lost about $180.

I have a friend who I know didnt get a refund.

There is someone elsewhere in this post who didnt get a refund.

I don't know what the refund rate is, but it isn't 100%.

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

#312

Post by Aeolun »

nemothekid wrote: post #54

> “It’s the student’s responsibility to know what they’re deploying.” Anyone who seriously argues this is 100% unaware of the quagmire that is AWS billing. There are companies with entire teams built around just optimizing AWS billing - it's whole unsurprising that some AWS feature actually spun up 5 separate AWS features that end up being billed.

Honestly, my company only forces everyone to add tags with ‘platform’ and ‘team’ to every resource that gets deployed to AWS (otherwise your resource is automatically destroyed).

This works perfectly for going to cost explorer and seeing exactly where you are spending your dollars.

I don’t think this is a very high difficulty exercise.

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

#313

Post by Aeolun »

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.…

> Unfortunately, some people are ignorant of this, or too timid to ask for their money back.

I guess that turns out to be good for AWS’s bottom line.

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

#314

Post by ryan29 »

davidgatti wrote: post #265
blabitty wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it reasonable to expect a brand new aws user to know how to do those things?

The same as it is not expected by anyone to know how to ride a bike or drive a car. Someone has to teach you or you have to go and take a course. Same with any technology, you should read first all the documentation that there is, watch all the videos that AWS releases every year for free where they explain in detail every service that they have, and try to explain the best practices of it - this is all for free, or…

> I need to stop blaming others and start owning my mistakes.

There's a big difference between owning up to your mistakes and taking on a bunch of unnecessary risk in situations where you know it's more likely you're going to make mistakes. IE: Learning, testing, etc..

In fact taking on unnecessary, possibly unlimited financial risk in a situation like that is a mistake. Want to own that one?

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

#315

Post by Aeolun »

okareaman wrote: post #124
labster wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He already lost half his wealth to his ex-wife, what more are you waiting for?

He's probably glad he's no longer married to his ex and he's still a mega billionaire. Not much punishment.

Infinite money / 2 = still infinite

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

#316

Post by onion2k »

davidgatti wrote: post #265
blabitty wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it reasonable to expect a brand new aws user to know how to do those things?

The same as it is not expected by anyone to know how to ride a bike or drive a car. Someone has to teach you or you have to go and take a course. Same with any technology, you should read first all the documentation that there is, watch all the videos that AWS releases every year for free where they explain in detail every service that they have, and try to explain the best practices of it - this is all for free, or…

Are you seriously suggesting that someone who wants to use AWS should go and read all the documentation and watch all the official videos available? That would take literally years. It's huge.

It also doesn't solve the problem. If the user makes a mistake they still lose a ton of money.

It's a really interesting problem. It's getting too big and too scary for a new developer to jump in and try AWS services, which means new devs will move on to newer services with better UX. I wonder if this sort of problem is one of the few existential threats AWS could actually face. Its possible it could end up as the Oracle or Salesforce of cloud services, very successful in enterprise but definitely not a good thing to have on your resume if you want to join a startup...

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

#318

Post by rorykoehler »

murukesh_s wrote: post #201
dotproto wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"They already win on UX" As someone that has tried and failed to get some small personal sites running on AWS a couple times, I'm going to have to tag this snippet with [citation needed].

agreed especially when compared to say Heroku or Digital ocean. I see many new comers struggling to deploy a small website. It's overwhelming. I understand that Heroku exists for such users and they are using AWS under the hood, but is there any service which takes AWS cloud APIs and simplifies it with a leaner UX?

AWS have a multitude of services that do this already. I’d recommend to go through their services one by one and learn what they offer.

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

#319

Post by rorykoehler »

indemnity wrote: post #43
artichokeheart wrote: post #24

AWS employs cost obfuscation by design otherwise the default view when you open the console would show you all of your current active services. Not only is that not the case, a single screen to show you all of your current active services doesn't exist. You need to take a deep dive into cost explorer (assuming you have access in corporate land) and try to decipher in what that all means.

Azure does this a little better, but best would be to see a breakdown on the invoice with links directly back to the resource. Maybe there are discounts or other processing that makes this hard. Or, less charitably, this would lead to people optimising their costs a lot better and canceling unused services much sooner.

Yes. Also split out into sub categories. How much of an ec2 spend was on bandwidth and how much on compute for example.

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

#320

Post by dom96 »

This is precisely the reason I have avoided AWS as a student and to this day I prefer providers that have clear billing like DO.

I don’t understand why anyone would use AWS when there is a risk of being charged stupid amounts of money if you screw something up. Are there advantages to AWS that I’m not seeing?

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