41–50 of 77 posts
We've done it. Now let's re-engineer our apps to use error codes for 200 responses and get free S3 usage.
AWS is full of dark patterns. You can sign up for the so-called "free" tier and then too easily, unwittingly enable something that suddenly charges you hundreds of dollars before you know it (by getting a bill at the end of the month), even if you're not doing anything with the service except looking around. AWS doesn't give any warning to free tier members that a configuration change is going to cost you, and their…
> AWS doesn't give any warning It does if you ask it to. You can get billing alerts if current costs are projected to go over a threshold.
If they auto-charge once the trial is over, I don't like them. That is a dark pattern.
Equally, with this, AWS could very well ask you, the user, what you'd like to do if you surpass the free tier. Charge? Or turn it all off.
On top of that they could instate default thresholds so that you, the person who just started their free trial, does not get bill shock when you forget to turn of that $200/h machine.
AWS is full of dark patterns. You can sign up for the so-called "free" tier and then too easily, unwittingly enable something that suddenly charges you hundreds of dollars before you know it (by getting a bill at the end of the month), even if you're not doing anything with the service except looking around. AWS doesn't give any warning to free tier members that a configuration change is going to cost you, and their…
> AWS doesn't give any warning It does if you ask it to. You can get billing alerts if current costs are projected to go over a threshold.
We've done it. Now let's re-engineer our apps to use error codes for 200 responses and get free S3 usage.
Another fan of parasitic computing - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasitic_computing
I administered a VBulletin forum, and naturally, we installed all sorts of gewgaws onto it, including an "arcade" where people could play games, share high scores, etc.
This arcade, somehow, came with its own built-in comment system, one where users could somehow register without registering for a proper VBulletin user account on our instance, and thus without admins being notified.
One day, we discovered this whole underbelly community that had apparently been thriving under our metaphorical floorboards, and promptly evicted them. In hindsight, I probably should have found some way to let them stick around, but recently several things had happened that hardened our stance to any sort of un-wanted users.
AWS is full of dark patterns. You can sign up for the so-called "free" tier and then too easily, unwittingly enable something that suddenly charges you hundreds of dollars before you know it (by getting a bill at the end of the month), even if you're not doing anything with the service except looking around. AWS doesn't give any warning to free tier members that a configuration change is going to cost you, and their…
The default is to have current and estimated monthly cost displayed on your root console as soon as you login. You will also get email alerts when you hit 50% and then 80% of your "free tier quota" in a month.
> even if you're not doing anything with the service except looking around.
I'm not aware of any services which will cost you money unless you actively enable them and create an object within it's class. Many services, such as S3, will attempt to force you into a "secured" configuration that avoids common traps by default.
> For example, PostgreSQL is advertised as free, but "Aurora PostgreSQL" is quite costly.
There's a rubric to the way AWS talks about it's internal services that is somewhat impenetrable at first. It's not too hard to figure out, though, if you take the time to read through their rather large set of documentation. That's the real price you must pay to successfully use the "free tier."
Anyways.. PostgreSQL is an open source project. Amazon RDS is a managed service that can run instances of it. Amazon Aurora is a different service that provides it's own engine that is _compatible_ with MySQL and PostgreSQL.
To know why you'd use one or the other, the shibboleth is "FAQ," so search for "AWS Aurora FAQ" and carefully read the whole page before you enable the service.
AWS is full of dark patterns. You can sign up for the so-called "free" tier and then too easily, unwittingly enable something that suddenly charges you hundreds of dollars before you know it (by getting a bill at the end of the month), even if you're not doing anything with the service except looking around. AWS doesn't give any warning to free tier members that a configuration change is going to cost you, and their…
> AWS doesn't give any warning It does if you ask it to. You can get billing alerts if current costs are projected to go over a threshold.
There's so much UX for a prospective new AWS dev that could be improved. Say a 1 click "do you want billing alerts with that?" Template, or a "do you want to lock down expensive nonfree stuff?" option to set some soft limits to zero out of the gate (nescessitating a self serve support case to unblock).
It's frustrating. It's been this way for over a decade yet you'll still see new customers cutting themselves on the nuances of free tier. I get that AWS is 'enterprise real deal do what I say', but I don't think that means you should completely exclude the customer story of any new developers just getting their feet wet. It's an area of customer obsession the business has regrettably lacked, and if you go by the continuous stories of people messing it up on HN/twitter/reddit/etc, it only becomes more glaring how little the new guys are being taken care of.
Can't imagine a change like this would be made without some analysis.. would love an internal view into a decision like this, I wonder if they already have log data to compute financial loss from the change, or if they have sampling instrumentation fancy enough to write/deploy custom reports like this quickly. In any case 2 weeks seems like an impressive turnaround for such a large service, unless they'd been interna…
> 2 weeks seems like an impressive turnaround for such a large service I assume they were lucky in that whatever system counts billable requests also has access to the response code, and therefore it's pretty easy to just say "if response == 403: return 0". The fact that is the case suggests they may do the work to fulfill the request before knowing the response code and doing billing, so there might be some loophole…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another fan of parasitic computing - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasitic_computing
I don't know if this counts, but I had something that I would call parasitic happen to me once. I administered a VBulletin forum, and naturally, we installed all sorts of gewgaws onto it, including an "arcade" where people could play games, share high scores, etc. This arcade, somehow , came with its own built-in comment system, one where users could somehow register without registering for a proper VBulletin user ac…
AWS is full of dark patterns. You can sign up for the so-called "free" tier and then too easily, unwittingly enable something that suddenly charges you hundreds of dollars before you know it (by getting a bill at the end of the month), even if you're not doing anything with the service except looking around. AWS doesn't give any warning to free tier members that a configuration change is going to cost you, and their…
> unwittingly enable something that suddenly charges you hundreds of dollars before you know it The default is to have current and estimated monthly cost displayed on your root console as soon as you login. You will also get email alerts when you hit 50% and then 80% of your "free tier quota" in a month. > even if you're not doing anything with the service except looking around. I'm not aware of any services which wi…
I don't even know where I would start with that. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ lists documentation for 305 different products!