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I've never worked with a tool that made me this scared to use it. I mean it. One wrong click and you can blow your budget, crash you entire system, the works.

I've never worked with a tool that made me this scared to use it. I mean it. One wrong click and you can blow your budget, crash you entire system, the works. Over the years I've grown used to it but the feeling of uneasiness will never leave me. I get it, AWS is very powerful but it does not give me the comfy feelings of using a product like Render or DigitalOcean, where I pay for what I need and that's the end of it.

rlayton2 6y ago
It would be nice to get a hard-cap on AWS costs. This tutorial includes how to setup alerts for a given budget: https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/hands-on/control-your-costs-free-tier-budgets/ https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/hands-on/control-your... I don't believe you can "halt everything" if you go over a certain amount though. I'd be happy to be proved wrong.
- Sebb767 6y ago
  > It would be nice to get a hard-cap on AWS costs. > I don't believe you can "halt everything" if you go over a certain amount though. You're pretty much on point. Handling a hard cut is simply not feasible for nearly all services. I.e. simply sending E-Mails in the middle of a news letter is not useful. You can have reasonable actions for some services (i.e. disallow new EC2 machines, add the end-of-month-cost for running ones to the bill), but this could break automation in strange ways (i.e. you suddenly could not spin up a large instance temporarily due to the limit). And how would you handle traffic? Disallow peaks? What about API gateway or other usage-based services? Lastly, AWS is all about scalability. Breaking so much, especially in the scalability space, for such a small feature is simply not worth it for them. So usually they're simply lenient on bills and take the occasional beating (and it's not like there would not be an equal amount of articles on "how AWS caps broke our system [and it did not warn us/the UI was bad/ ...]"). The missing hard cap is the reason I don't have an account there, but I can absolutely understand why they don't have it.
  - wildfire 6y ago
    They do have things called service limits. I've never been in a situation where I wanted it decreased, but I guess you could setup an account and ask for a decrease. If enough people ask for it, they might make it something you can do yourself.
ineedasername 6y ago
For the budget, you can set alarms about your expenditures. For the rest, I don't think I've ever worked with any piece of infrastructure that couldn't be crashed with one wrong click or keystroke. I've seen it lots of times, at least a few times a year: theret are dozens of systems and countless servers, and sometimes human error bring one down. You roll back the changes, reboot, or whatever action is called for and move on. What's different is the perception that cloud infrastructure should be significantly easier. But the ways in which it's easier are not in the area of mitigating the impacts of human error.
Something1234 6y ago
What's Render?

rlayton2 6y ago

It would be nice to get a hard-cap on AWS costs. This tutorial includes how to setup alerts for a given budget: https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/hands-on/control-your-costs-free-tier-budgets/ https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/hands-on/control-your... I don't believe you can "halt everything" if you go over a certain amount though. I'd be happy to be proved wrong.

Sebb767 6y ago
> It would be nice to get a hard-cap on AWS costs. > I don't believe you can "halt everything" if you go over a certain amount though. You're pretty much on point. Handling a hard cut is simply not feasible for nearly all services. I.e. simply sending E-Mails in the middle of a news letter is not useful. You can have reasonable actions for some services (i.e. disallow new EC2 machines, add the end-of-month-cost for running ones to the bill), but this could break automation in strange ways (i.e. you suddenly could not spin up a large instance temporarily due to the limit). And how would you handle traffic? Disallow peaks? What about API gateway or other usage-based services? Lastly, AWS is all about scalability. Breaking so much, especially in the scalability space, for such a small feature is simply not worth it for them. So usually they're simply lenient on bills and take the occasional beating (and it's not like there would not be an equal amount of articles on "how AWS caps broke our system [and it did not warn us/the UI was bad/ ...]"). The missing hard cap is the reason I don't have an account there, but I can absolutely understand why they don't have it.
- wildfire 6y ago
  They do have things called service limits. I've never been in a situation where I wanted it decreased, but I guess you could setup an account and ask for a decrease. If enough people ask for it, they might make it something you can do yourself.

ineedasername 6y ago

For the budget, you can set alarms about your expenditures. For the rest, I don't think I've ever worked with any piece of infrastructure that couldn't be crashed with one wrong click or keystroke. I've seen it lots of times, at least a few times a year: theret are dozens of systems and countless servers, and sometimes human error bring one down. You roll back the changes, reboot, or whatever action is called for and move on. What's different is the perception that cloud infrastructure should be significantly easier. But the ways in which it's easier are not in the area of mitigating the impacts of human error.

Something1234 6y ago

What's Render?