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Yeah, do not do this. You'll end up with a $1000 bill from Amazon becuase you forgot to shut it down and discover very quickly they don't care at all once they

Yeah, do not do this. You'll end up with a $1000 bill from Amazon becuase you forgot to shut it down and discover very quickly they don't care at all once they already have your money.

scarecrowbob 7y ago
FWIW, I did that once for an unrelated project and they ate the 1200 bill for a running EC2. I dunno if they'd eat that cost again, and I wouldn't try it on purpose. But keep in mind that they have an incentive to do this: it's the cost of acquiring users without scaring them about a possibly humongous bill. I now have better billing alarms set.
- Bombthecat 7y ago
  They should just add an "shutdown at cost x option" for private users at least..
  - awinder 7y ago
    https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/tutorials/control-your-costs-free-tier-budgets/ https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/tutorials/control-you... Under section 4, anyone can set up an aws cost budget
    - arianestrasse 7y ago
      Yes, you can set up a budget but it's only used for alerting. The services will happily keep running and building up to that 1k bill if you miss the alerts or don't react to them.
      - thaeli 7y ago
        Those alerts can invoke a Lambda that shuts the service down, which is a ridiculously baroque solution but it's what you get.
        arianestrasse 7y ago
        Wow, they really made it complex, didn't they? On one hand they advertise how anyone can spin up a VM and connect to it but you still need to do some serverless black magic to keep your budget in check. Anyway, thanks for the heads up. I'll definitely try that out.
        shoo 7y ago
        The aim of the game is for you to be depending on even more AWS services to help you use the ones you already have
        thephyber 7y ago
        > ridiculously baroque solution It seems to follow their practice of building the “API first” solution. By the way, a lambda/programmatic solution allows you to disable lower priority resources and retain higher priority resources. It’s a lot of effort, but it’s incredibly flexible.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - luhn 7y ago
        Additionally billing alarms have a max precision of a day, so if you manage to really screw up you can rack up a huge bill before the alarm goes off.
  - nostrebored 7y ago
    You can set up billing alarms with thresholds which send you sms/email alerts
  - scarecrowbob 7y ago
    Yeah, that's not a terrible idea. But I work with tools that could, like, cut my thumbs off... I feel like this is still pretty nerfed up by comparison.
wnevets 7y ago
>and discover very quickly they don't care at all once they already have your money. That hasn't been my experience with AWS but then again it has been years since I allowed such a thing to happen.
phendrenad2 7y ago
Setting up a CloudWatch alert to email you when the bill goes over $10 in 6 hours is a good measure (of course you probably won't get the alert for 24 hours because of Amazon's billing update delay).

Yeah, do not do this. You'll end up with a $1000 bill from Amazon becuase you forgot to shut it down and discover very quickly they don't care at all once they already have your money.

scarecrowbob 7y ago

FWIW, I did that once for an unrelated project and they ate the 1200 bill for a running EC2. I dunno if they'd eat that cost again, and I wouldn't try it on purpose. But keep in mind that they have an incentive to do this: it's the cost of acquiring users without scaring them about a possibly humongous bill. I now have better billing alarms set.

Bombthecat 7y ago
They should just add an "shutdown at cost x option" for private users at least..
- awinder 7y ago
  https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/tutorials/control-your-costs-free-tier-budgets/ https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/tutorials/control-you... Under section 4, anyone can set up an aws cost budget
  - arianestrasse 7y ago
    Yes, you can set up a budget but it's only used for alerting. The services will happily keep running and building up to that 1k bill if you miss the alerts or don't react to them.
    - thaeli 7y ago
      Those alerts can invoke a Lambda that shuts the service down, which is a ridiculously baroque solution but it's what you get.
      - arianestrasse 7y ago
        Wow, they really made it complex, didn't they? On one hand they advertise how anyone can spin up a VM and connect to it but you still need to do some serverless black magic to keep your budget in check. Anyway, thanks for the heads up. I'll definitely try that out.
        shoo 7y ago
        The aim of the game is for you to be depending on even more AWS services to help you use the ones you already have
      - thephyber 7y ago
        > ridiculously baroque solution It seems to follow their practice of building the “API first” solution. By the way, a lambda/programmatic solution allows you to disable lower priority resources and retain higher priority resources. It’s a lot of effort, but it’s incredibly flexible.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - luhn 7y ago
      Additionally billing alarms have a max precision of a day, so if you manage to really screw up you can rack up a huge bill before the alarm goes off.
- nostrebored 7y ago
  You can set up billing alarms with thresholds which send you sms/email alerts
- scarecrowbob 7y ago
  Yeah, that's not a terrible idea. But I work with tools that could, like, cut my thumbs off... I feel like this is still pretty nerfed up by comparison.

wnevets 7y ago

>and discover very quickly they don't care at all once they already have your money. That hasn't been my experience with AWS but then again it has been years since I allowed such a thing to happen.

phendrenad2 7y ago

Setting up a CloudWatch alert to email you when the bill goes over $10 in 6 hours is a good measure (of course you probably won't get the alert for 24 hours because of Amazon's billing update delay).