451–457 of 457 posts
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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)
I don't have any elastic IPs. The only thing under EC2 is a security group that it won't let me delete, but seems like no resources. My bill this month is $2.88 /shrug
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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…
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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! --- $20 or $200 doesn't matter - how on earth could you have a credit card if you can't afford to pay off $200? --- AWS…
Who cares how they got the card, maybe it's a debit card, maybe it's their parent's or partners. Maybe they've got one that only allows a very low limit of charges.
The point is that there's a whole ton of people for whom $200 isn't a "Oh, well, that's a learning exercise - better be more careful next time".
> What's wrong with buyer beware?
Buyer beware is fine where all parties are fully aware of all repercussions.
However, you'll note that this doesn't apply to certain kinds of transactions, particularly financial transactions.
In some cases, you're either required to go through an expert who can advise you on the downsides and risks, or the seller is required to ensure that the buyer is fully informed of the risks.
It's the same reason we have warning signs on a whole bunch of things about how they could injure themselves.
Without the ability for someone to limit the damage, someone could be up for thousands of dollars in spend without being aware of how they even got there.
> AWS aren't scheming to scape little bits of money from small time developers
It's not even students and other inexperienced people that end up in bill-shock.
I've dealt with well-experienced senior developers who've gone off to an AWS Conference and spent a day or three being lulled by the story about how X is the new hotness, and would solve all the problems we have.
The AWS reps have all confirmed the story that X is the new hotness, and it's perfect for some new solution - and they've got some big name customer who's implemented it and saved millions Vs their legacy on-site solution. The AWS reps also hand out tens of thousands in account credits like they're mentos, with the message "Go play, see if it works for you".
Those senior developers have taken a look at the pricing on the thing, thought they understood it, and then fired up a demo to prove it out. When the billing starts to come in, there's been shock from them that they spent so much in so little time.
The pricing on things is quite opaque with one headline price for something, but doesn't include that you'll also need to consider the pricing for other bits. The billing is often delayed quite signfiicantly, and alerting is only useful as an indicator of how much you've fucked up, rather than a way to prevent it.
So, yeah, with AWS marketing all their solutions as being much lower cost, while at the same time not making it clear on what things do cost, and not making tools that you can prevent major fuckups -- they definitely do need to shoulder some blame.
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> 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…
Agree with all of this. I think the reason you're getting so much pushback is that you started this conversation with "not sure where the problem is". Clearly you do see the problem - AWS encourages beginners to get going as quickly as possible with these tutorials and the free tier, but then makes it difficult for those users to avoid unexpected charges. They should either stop encouraging beginners, or start offeri…
Anyway, life gose on, and it was overall a good chat :)
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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.
For example, their CDN has no "TB per month limit". If your site gets popular and is 100% cacheable, you could be getting a million dollar bill.
I hear similar horror stories about the various distributed databases in several clouds. They're all crazy expensive.
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I keep a penny on my desk at work. Every time a coworker comes across somebody's account that is off by a penny, I offer it. They think I'm being funny, but the point I'm trying to make is that it wastes more than pennies worth of our time to spend it worrying about a few cents. I've seen people mail in checks worth less than the stamp it took to send them. It's a wild world out there.
The interesting thing is, accounts being off by a penny or two (excluding actions such as customers doing a mis-type in the bank transfer) can actually point to deeper issues such as improper rounding somewhere in the path.
Is there seriously no way in AWS/Azure/GCP to specify "Here's my budget, shut everything down if I exceed $X"? I don't use those platforms much but was always surprised I couldn't find anything like that right off the bat. I'll build cloud stuff if it makes sense at work, but if I'm footing the bill I'll stick to something that can provide an actual upper limit.