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As a mostly hobbyist developer, I've always had such a hard time with AWS. I've tried Serverless a couple of times, but I couldn't for the life of me really und

As a mostly hobbyist developer, I've always had such a hard time with AWS. I've tried Serverless a couple of times, but I couldn't for the life of me really understand Amazon's billing structure. For instance, while AWS Lambda supposedly has a generous free tier for the function execution, by the time you add the rest of the infrastructure to call the function over http, you start incurring fees. Mind you, they are incredibly modest, but its hard to really pull the trigger and commit without having a lot of confidence over exactly where those fees are coming from and how to confidently stop it/put caps on it. I fully acknowledge that there are resources or options that I could be totally missing. If there is anyone who has gone through this sort of thing and has successfully managed to get really transparent look at pricing and reliably and easily shut down/provision/cap AWS services, do let me know!

moduspwnens14 9y ago
Personally, I've had the opposite experience. You can set billing alerts that will e-mail you when you cross whatever thresholds you set. On the billing page, it has a line item for each thing that costs money. It's not particularly difficult to stop anything, especially when you're just doing hobby projects anyway. If you're OK with insignificant (less than $10) charges on your credit card, it's really not that hard to get pretty far with serverless. Almost everything serverless has perpetual free tiers and the ones that don't (API Gateway, CloudFront, Route 53) have very low usage-based costs (less than $1/mo idle). If you put any value at all on your time, you'd cross these amounts almost immediately trying to setup / learn anything else.
nolite 9y ago
Hi, I'm suffering from the AWS billing madness too, and trying to understand if others share some of the same issues I've seen. Could I contact you to hear more about your billing frustrations?
ringaroundthetx 9y ago
It is definitely hard to have the foresight necessary, and this whole industry could benefit from a book of devops case studies. That being said, turn off the EC2 instances and there is rarely an ongoing trickle of costs, as the other services mostly are billed on how much they are invoked, which is good for hobby projects.
longsangstan 9y ago
For me the main problem is that there is no bill capping in AWS - if the bill exceeds, say, $100, just shut down all my services no matter what. As a poor hobbyist dev I just cannot bear the risk of an unexpected high bill, although the chance of that is very slim.

moduspwnens14 9y ago

Personally, I've had the opposite experience. You can set billing alerts that will e-mail you when you cross whatever thresholds you set. On the billing page, it has a line item for each thing that costs money. It's not particularly difficult to stop anything, especially when you're just doing hobby projects anyway. If you're OK with insignificant (less than $10) charges on your credit card, it's really not that hard to get pretty far with serverless. Almost everything serverless has perpetual free tiers and the ones that don't (API Gateway, CloudFront, Route 53) have very low usage-based costs (less than $1/mo idle). If you put any value at all on your time, you'd cross these amounts almost immediately trying to setup / learn anything else.

nolite 9y ago

Hi, I'm suffering from the AWS billing madness too, and trying to understand if others share some of the same issues I've seen. Could I contact you to hear more about your billing frustrations?

ringaroundthetx 9y ago

It is definitely hard to have the foresight necessary, and this whole industry could benefit from a book of devops case studies. That being said, turn off the EC2 instances and there is rarely an ongoing trickle of costs, as the other services mostly are billed on how much they are invoked, which is good for hobby projects.

longsangstan 9y ago

For me the main problem is that there is no bill capping in AWS - if the bill exceeds, say, $100, just shut down all my services no matter what. As a poor hobbyist dev I just cannot bear the risk of an unexpected high bill, although the chance of that is very slim.