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

A $1k AWS mistake

geocod.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 281 posts

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#41

Post by wiether »

viraptor wrote: post #11

The service gateways are such a weird thing in AWS. There seems to be no reason not to use them and it's like they only exist as a trap for the unaware.

Reading all the posts about people who got bitten by some policies on AWS, I think they should create two modes:

- raw

- click-ops

Because, when you build your infra from scratch on AWS, you absolutely don't want the service gateways to exist by default. You want to have full control on everything, and that's how it works now. You don't want AWS to insert routes in your route tables on your behalf. Or worse, having hidden routes that are used by default.

But I fully understand that some people don't want to be bothered but those technicalities and want something that work and is optimized following the Well-Architected Framework pillars.

IIRC they already provide some CloudFormation Stacks that can do some of this for you, but it's still too technical and obscure.

Currently they probably rely on their partner network to help onboard new customers, but for small customers it doesn't make sense.

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#43

Post by thecodemonkey »

ryanjshaw wrote: post #38

As a bootstrapped dev, reading stories like these gives me so much anxiety. I just can’t bring myself to use AWS even despite its advantages.

We are also 100% customer-funded. AWS makes sense for us for the enterprise version of Geocodio where we are SOC2 audited and HIPAA-compliant.

We are primarily using Hetzner for the self-serve version of Geocodio and have been a very happy customer for decades.

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#44

Post by 4gotunameagain »

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 for wealth accumulation & inequality.

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#45

Post by rwmj »

Dunedan wrote: post #29
CjHuber wrote: post #7

Does Amazon refund you for mistakes, or do you have to land on HN frontpage for that to happen?

Depends on various factors and of course the amount of money in question. I've had AWS approve a refund for a rather large sum a few years ago, but that took quite a bit of back and forth with them. Crucial for the approval was that we had cost alerts already enabled before it happened and were able to show that this didn't help at all, because they triggered way too late. We also had to explain in detail what measur…

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

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#46

Post by [deleted] »

plantain wrote: post #34
embedding-shape wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Premium bandwidth" which AWS/Amazon markets to less understanding developers is almost a scam. By now, software developers think data centers, ISPs and others part of the peering on the internet pay per GB transferred, because all the clouds charge them like that.

Try a single threaded download from Hetzner Finland versus eu-north-1 to a remote (i.e. Australia) destination and you'll see premium bandwidth is very real. Google Cloud Storage significantly more so than AWS. Sure you can just ram more connections through the lossy links from budget providers or use obscure protocols, but there's a real difference. Whether it's fairly priced, I suspect not.

[deleted]

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#47

Post by stef25 »

Made a similar mistake like this once. While just playing around to see what's possible I upload some data to the AWS algo that will recommended products to your users based on everyone's previous purchases.

I uploaded a small xls with uid and prodid columns and then kind of forgot about it.

A few months later I get a note from bank saying your account is overdrawn. The account is only used for freelancing work which I wasn't doing at the time, so I never checked that account.

Looks like AWS was charging me over 1K / month while the algo continuously worked on that bit of data that was uploaded one time. They charged until there was no money left.

That was about 5K in weekend earnings gone. Several months worth of salary in my main job. That was a lot of money for me.

Few times I've felt so horrible.

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#48

Post by andrewstuart »

chistev wrote: post #39
andrewstuart wrote: post #32

Why are people still using AWS? And then writing “I regret it” posts that end up on HN. Why are people not getting the message to not use AWS? There’s SO MANY other faster cheaper less complex more reliable options but people continue to use AWS. It makes no sense.

Examples?

Of what?

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#50

Post by stef25 »

CjHuber wrote: post #7

Does Amazon refund you for mistakes, or do you have to land on HN frontpage for that to happen?

> Does Amazon refund you for mistakes

Hard no. Had to pay I think 100$ for premium support to find that out.

Post reply on HN