Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt • Hacker News Board

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

#411

Post by stadium » Wed, May 05, 2021, 3:51 PM UTC

The AWS billing dashboard has a "budgets" feature. I just added a daily account-level budget of $1 to my dev sandbox account, and setup an alert at 50% of the budget or $0.50. It took about a minute to setup.

You can choose to include or exclude refunds and credits. If you exclude them, I am guessing but it should show your true cost without the free tier pricing. If they are included it would tell you the impact right after any free tier offers expired.

Perhaps setting a budget like this should be part of any organization's new account setup process.

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

#412

Post by thayne » Wed, May 05, 2021, 3:52 PM UTC

nrmitchi wrote: post #391

thayne wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Terraform has it's shortcomings for sure, but I don't think it's reasonable to expect Terraform to go out and clean up second-order effects of it's resources. I'm not doubting that the situations you describe are true, but abandoning resources like that is an AWS-lifecycle problem, not really a Terraform one.

Sure. My point is just that `terraform destroy` doesn't necessarily solve the problem at hand. And you could still end up continue paying for those second-order effects after running a terraform destroy.

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

#413

Post by sireat » Wed, May 05, 2021, 4:02 PM UTC

I refuse to let my students touch AWS directly exactly because of this infinite billing problem.

My current workaround is finding some SaaS provider that is willing to take the risk on free accounts and act as a middleman.

Currently using aiven.io - downside: this covers only a small subset of services that aws offers.

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

#414

Post by TheFlyingFish » Wed, May 05, 2021, 4:08 PM UTC

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?

I think that's basically what Lightsail is supposed to be. I haven't used it myself, but from glancing at it they're pretty clearly targeting DO/Linode/Vultr etc.

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

#415

Post by TheFlyingFish » Wed, May 05, 2021, 4:12 PM UTC

therockspush wrote: post #227

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I will gladly welcome the eventual IPv4 extinction, but unfortunately I'm pretty confident it won't happen for another 30 years.

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

#416

Post by TedDoesntTalk » Wed, May 05, 2021, 4:53 PM UTC

fragmede wrote: post #395

crispyambulance wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an antidote to the "nothing is too hard" flex... Everything has trade-off's. When a responsible person says something is "too hard" it's because they've evaluated the consequences and have deemed them too costly in terms of time, resources, cost, maintenance, or strategy/lost-opportunity. Some things really are "too hard". I agree it's not too hard technically but am surprised at your contradictory suggestion AWS…

The problem is, what to do when your account hits the limit? The subtle point about EC2 is you can’t actually shut down servers and have them come back up later unless you have a specific configuration - which not everybody has, so you can’t simply power off systems and not destroy something. Not insurmountable, but not trivial either. You also can’t say that there’s a limit except for an incompatible subset of produ…

> nor can you ask users to be okay with randomly destroying things

what do you think will happen to your EC2 instances if your payment method on file with Amazon fails repeatedly and for more than 30 days? Do you think they will just keep those instances intact indefinitely without payment because they promised not to 'randomly destroy things'?

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

#417

Post by namelessoracle » Wed, May 05, 2021, 5:02 PM UTC

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.…

Might just be an urban legend but doesnt Amazon keep track of people who do too many refunds and cancel services with them? I've heard of and met people who dont do minor returns to Amazon because they were afraid it would put their Prime account on some kind of "naughty list"

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

#418

Post by nemothekid » Wed, May 05, 2021, 5:02 PM UTC

ActorNightly wrote: post #144

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.

Ill seriously argue this. The issue is that when students are "learning" "cloud", they are not really learning cloud as much as following tutorials to click together turnkey solutions. Dynamo DB, ElasicSearch, and whatever else are all business-oriented, quick to set up services. And such, these services are hiding what is going on underneath, with the expectation that the company will cover the costs of whatever tho…

You are making the assumption that most people are starting these AWS accounts to "learn cloud" when that isn't the case. AWS advertises a free tier for many functions that have nothing to do with "learning cloud".

For example, in the article, the poor student was using Amazon SageMaker to likely build and train models. Blaming the student and saying "why didn't he just buy his own GPU" when Amazon offered 50 hours of free training comes across of out of touch. If the student had the money for a decent desktop he wouldn't be crying over $200.

Amazon could fix this problem easily by introducing a billing cap. While others say it's malevolence as to why Amazon doesn't build one, I think it's more likely that even Amazon couldn't even add this feature to their sprawling billing infrastructure even if they wanted dto.

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

#419

Post by dennis_jeeves » Wed, May 05, 2021, 5:43 PM UTC

adamparsons wrote: post #108

I cancelled an account 2 years ago because no matter how much I explored cost manager or any regions I used, I can't find why I still get billed a small dollar or so a month. I still get bills on the 3rd of each month, followed by a "we can't charge your card" (I removed it when they pulled this shit) followed by a few days later you get the "hey we're gonna suspend your account if you don't pay" Yeah cool, I only cl…

Came in to say I had to do the same thing, close i.e an account to stop being charged.

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

#420

Post by murukesh_s » Wed, May 05, 2021, 5:49 PM UTC

dmitriid wrote: post #409

murukesh_s wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heroku is very simple - you just create an app and "push" code to a repository tied to the app. You need to write code of course, but they auto-detect the language and prepare the environment or platform for you (so platform as a service). They tried to appease the geeks by making everything powered by CLI - but otherwise its just point and click for deploying apps. Tinkering with nginx is good, but what if you want…

> but what if you want to add a database, a cache, a logging service? I... just add it. How do I add it in heroku where everything is "just create an app and push it" and everything is separate "dynos" (whatever that is), each with different pricing, storage, bandwidth etc.

that is true. everything is a separate dyno - means separate machine/vm to which you need to connect to. You get free tier for almost all databases and you only need to know how to connect to it, not tinkering with the storage, tune the parameters, scheduled backups, automatic scalability etc - that's done for you. it will become expensive once you go past free tier or the cheap tiers though.