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Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

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

#441

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1. yes I am, studying years to be a doctor, lawyer, Engineer etc from your point of view is also to much? Should you just start cutting people to figure out how a body works end expect for everything to be ok once you are done? The point being, yes you have to study to learn something, there is no way around it. 2. If money is a concern to you, then I should focus on learning how exactly the billing works and how to…

What do you think about this page: https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/ ? > Select a learning path for step-by-step tutorials to get you up and running in less than an hour. Do you think it's irresponsible for AWS to encourage beginners to try their service when they apparently only intend it to be used by those with a computer science degree and 5-year apprenticeship under an experienced sysadmin?

> What do you think about this page: https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/

It is very dangerous. If you select the full-stack tutorial you get: "Time to Complete 30 minutes". It should say: "30 min to ruin your life" ;)

If you want to really learn AWS, then this page should be used as a reference of how to design a stack. If I were you I would read the tutorials to see which services are needed for a solution, but before doing anything, I would read the docs for each of those services to really understand them, then I would go back to the tutorial and actually do it, and - MOST IMPORTANTLY - I would read the pricing page for each service that you are going to use.

> Do you think it's irresponsible for AWS to encourage beginners to try their service when they apparently only intend it to be used by those with a computer science degree and 5-year apprenticeship under an experienced sysadmin?

100% - when I started working with AWS in 2016 I had a very hard time figuring it out, because I was looking for the simplicity the the marketing team was writing about. I really don't like what the marketing team tries to tell you, because it dose not exist.

Regarding an approach to learn about AWS, I would start with all the serverless services that they have, since the pricing for most of them is ideal for beginners (WARNING - read the pricing page for each since not all have a free staring plane, like S3 and DynamoDB) and for simple weekend projects.

For example, I did build this project a while ago: https://github.com/0x4447/0x4447_product_s3_email, if you scroll down to the pricing section you will see this:

``` All resources deployed via this stack will potentially cost you money. But you'd have to do the following for this to happen:

- Invoke Lambdas over 1,000,000 times a month - Send and receive over 1000 emails a month - Perform over 10,000 Get and Put operations and over 2000 Delete operations in your S3 Bucket - Exceed 100 build minutes on CodeBuild - $1 per active CodePipeline (must run at least once a month to be considered active)

The only payment you'll encounter from Day One is an S3 storage fee for emails and CodePipeline artifacts. ```

So you can have a stack that is actually doing something very useful that costs not even a $1 a month.

It is possible to pay $0 to AWS, but you need to first understand AWS to be able to do it, another trivial example of a tiny project that is useful and cost $0 to run: https://github.com/0x4447/0x4447_product_secure301

The last point would be: don't listen to the marketing material - they are there to sell you AWS, marketing never cares about reality.

I also recommend this website https://awsvideocatalog.com - pick a service and watch all the keynotes AWS has on that service, if you'd spend 1h a day, in 6 months you'll know more about AWS then anyone else complaining here.

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

#442
post #423

For accounts you want to put spend limits on always use a pre-paid card or card with spend limits https://privacy.com/ .

Privacy.com doesn't believe anyone would want their service if they have a land-line, and not a mobile. "Give us your phone number", okay, "we sent a confirmation SMS" ... hahahahaha.

Yes you can probably dodge that by going with a SMS enabled VoIP provider.

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

#443
post #352
post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, I think not. My business needs to run. Would be very painful if an engineer put in a hard shutdown at $X and then left the company only for me to find out after all my services are shutdown when we've grown past $X. This is a hard no from me. How is AWS going to even know what to shutdown/remove? What if it's storage causing my bill to overextend? Yeah, not just no, but hell no.

What if that engineer fat fingered and reserved a million GPU instances instead though? It would be nice if cloud providers were better at surfacing potentially company killing things via their dashboards and nag emails.

Well, they’d have to first contact support and get the instance limits lifted… it would be one hell of a fat finger.

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

#444
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s extremely hard to design, at least with the current state of what AWS bills and does not bill. Example: let’s assume you’ve set the cut-off budget too strict, spun off another shard for your stateful service (DB for example), it received and stored some data during the short window before some other service brought whole account over budget (i.e. paid egress crossed the threshold). To bring VM and EBS charges…

> So, to fully comply w/o risking losing customer data, AWS will have to stop charging for not running instances and inactive EBS volumes which most definitely bring on many kinds of abuse. Another option would be to "reserve" them in the budget. That is, when for instance you create a 10 GB EBS volume, count it in the budget as if it will be kept for the whole month (and all months after that). Yes, that would mean…

This creates a surprising situation.

We have a batch process that uses S3 as a way to temporarily store some big datasets while another streams and processes then and, once complete, removes them. This takes like an hour.

So our S3 bill could be, let’s say, $10/mo. If you went and looked at your S3 bill and saw that and thought setting a $20 cap would give you reasonable headroom you’d be sorely surprised when S3 stopped accepting writes or other services started getting shut down or failing next time the batch job triggered.

Under this system, the budget and actual bill need to be off by a factor of more than 10 ($240). And this also doesn’t stop your bill being off by a factor of 10 from what you “wanted” to set your limit to. More than the $200 under discussion.

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

#445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s extremely hard to design, at least with the current state of what AWS bills and does not bill. Example: let’s assume you’ve set the cut-off budget too strict, spun off another shard for your stateful service (DB for example), it received and stored some data during the short window before some other service brought whole account over budget (i.e. paid egress crossed the threshold). To bring VM and EBS charges…

They can simply add a nuclear option. Ordinary business probably won't enable that option but individuals can and should set it up.

It’s a lot easier for them to refund the individuals who make mistakes than deal with the fallout and bad press from the small businesses they’ve destroyed when they incorrectly enable that option.

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

#446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a good lesson in cloud computing to know how much you're spending on services. Usually if you're a single person and you leave an expensive product running unknowingly, AWS support have been kind and refund you the money and take the loss as 'customer made an error' type transaction. It's not like they hold the debt over your head for life. I think the article is a bit extreme to highlight the person's reaction,…

The problem is only partially "know how much you're spending on services". There's a big problem of: There's a huge amount of AWS that even if you configure it "right" - still leaves you with potentially unlimited liability. Take a simple example of using Cloudfront and S3 together to host a basic website. There's a good well documented way of securing this all "right". However that doesn't protect you from "slashdot…

Taking your cloudfront example, the free tier covers 50GB data out at 2 million requests - so your image would need to be less that 25KB to be under the free tier limit.

Taking a 4MB image, that would equate to around 8TB which is priced at under $1.

Make that 20 million views and you hit $10 - oof!

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$20 or $200 doesn't matter - how on earth could you have a credit card if you can't afford to pay off $200?

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AWS is great and people are free to try it out. They should also be aware that things cost money and not to put their credit card down for services without being fully aware of the costs associated.

It's like buying a property for investment then complaining to the real estate agent later down the line for a number of issues the property has that require maintenance down the line.

What's wrong with buyer beware? Why can't people/big companies offer services without people crying foul about 'getting hurt from bill shock'? Where's the personal responsibility and accountability for your own actions and decisions gone?

AWS aren't scheming to scape little bits of money from small time developers. They're interested in catching big fish companies who are looking to choose their platform / service offering in the cloud computing space. If you think these small time developers with 'bill caps so i don't overspend' is at the top of their feature priority list you've got the wrong idea about the business.

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

#447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Damn, I can't imagine how you felt... Only the unique experiences in this thread are enough to know how f*cked up AWS billing is.

Felt like a complete idiot, I guess I'm not smart enough to use AWS's UI in a safe way. When we start trusting tools, we inevitably become complacent. Some user flows are designed to be gotcha's. A little gotcha machine that generates |cost - refund| revenue. They gotcha, and there's nothing you can do about it but beg them for a (usually partial) refund. The refund is the thing that makes you feel better about it. ¯…

Thats exactly the impression I got when I was reading the AWS docs. I am a student too and was evaluating AWS for a hobby project.

Reading the docs I got the feeling that the product is designed for big cooperations only. But not for someone who wants real price control. The free account just made no sense to me.

I ended up renting a cloud server ~3€ a month. (Not AWS) Looking at this thread this was the best decision I could make.

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

#448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is in line with all the bad things I've heard about Amazon. Why do people work there?

The CV title of having worked at FAANG and the big tech compensation.

In the UK at least, Amazon pay relatively poorly compared to other the FAANG companies and Finance.

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

#449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> not tinkering with the storage, tune the parameters, scheduled backups, automatic scalability etc - that's done for you.

Thing is: if we're looking for free, that may make sense. you still need tinkering though: you need to figure out what the whole dyno thing is about and how to connect from one dyno to another, and so on.

However, if we expand this a tiny bit to cheap and/or free, then simply running the lowest-tier server at Digital Ocean will be a better proposition. And installing a database these days is basically the same thing: run a command to install, all you need is to connect to it. No tinkering. And it will still probably scale significantly better than a free tier at Heroku :)

Once again, I'm biased and old, and can afford to spend money on side projects. I know that sometimes even $15 a month is out of reach (oh, I've been there). But yeah, this sorta prevents me from ever understanding Heroku :)

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

#450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does the bill details screen show? I manage an AWS bill and I find it overly detailed. Others mentioned leftover EIPs, but the bill shows these as their own line item. Not saying it can't happen, but I've never seen an 'Other' listed on the bill details screen. As I said above, it's detailed to a fault.

Actually it looks like this is for an EBS snapshot. Now it seems like EBS is a Lightsail feature, and the Lightsail console says that I don't have any storage or snapshots? Hm

EBS is also the general external storage attached to an instance. Go the ec2 console and look at snapshots and you should see it there. They are region specific, so make sure to select the region referred to on the bill.

I haven't used Lightsail, so I'm not sure if those snapshots end up in the general ec2 console. But, if you already checked the LS console and didn't see anything, then they must be in the ec2 console.

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