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The same as it is not expected by anyone to know how to ride a bike or drive a car. Someone has to teach you or you have to go and take a course. Same with any

The same as it is not expected by anyone to know how to ride a bike or drive a car. Someone has to teach you or you have to go and take a course. Same with any technology, you should read first all the documentation that there is, watch all the videos that AWS releases every year for free where they explain in detail every service that they have, and try to explain the best practices of it - this is all for free, or you could spend $1000 for a course, instead of risking to lose $10.000. If you jump in to the water without knowing how to swim, and then get angry at the water because you drown - well... After 18 years of age you become a grown up, because your parents are not responsible for you anymore. You become responsible for yourself. That is what distinguish a child from a grown up. Of course a parent needs also to tech you responsibility and what it means. Mine for example never did, and I had to learn life the hard way. At first I was blaming others, but then I realized that to really grow up, I need to stop blaming others and start owning my mistakes. So, it is not expected for anyone to know everything, but it is expected that if you want to learn something new, you need to first research the topic.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
puszczyk 5y ago
You can by insure for you as a driver and for your car (and in many jurisdictions have to) — this limits your responsibility. You can spend $10000 on AWS and still make a mistake and pay another $10k+. I don’t get the point that AWS docs are free. I mean, they are free, but the services are not. Do you pay for a visit in a car dealership?
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > You can by insure for you as a driver and for your car (and in many jurisdictions have to) — this limits your responsibility Real insurance policies have maximum coverage limits, so, while it reduces your liability by a capped amount, it doesn’t, strictly speaking, limit it; you still face unbounded potential liability beyond your insurance coverage.
  - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
    what's the biggest unexpected billing of AWS fees reported? I'm thinking 100,000 seems unlikely to be reached very often. on edit: this is not to say that I believe an insurance for this kind of thing would really work (although maybe that is because I know nothing about the insurance business) just that I don't think the problem with the insurance would be that you could always end up getting billed more than you were insured for.
ryan29 5y ago
> I need to stop blaming others and start owning my mistakes. There's a big difference between owning up to your mistakes and taking on a bunch of unnecessary risk in situations where you know it's more likely you're going to make mistakes. IE: Learning, testing, etc.. In fact taking on unnecessary, possibly unlimited financial risk in a situation like that is a mistake. Want to own that one?
onion2k 5y ago
Are you seriously suggesting that someone who wants to use AWS should go and read all the documentation and watch all the official videos available? That would take literally years. It's huge. It also doesn't solve the problem. If the user makes a mistake they still lose a ton of money. It's a really interesting problem. It's getting too big and too scary for a new developer to jump in and try AWS services, which means new devs will move on to newer services with better UX. I wonder if this sort of problem is one of the few existential threats AWS could actually face. Its possible it could end up as the Oracle or Salesforce of cloud services, very successful in enterprise but definitely not a good thing to have on your resume if you want to join a startup...
- Applejinx 5y ago
  I would not want to be the competing cloud service, with self-imposed limits of only what people are willing and expecting to pay, going up against Amazon (or any other cloud service of that scale) where they not only have scale already, but are being paid the extra money regularly by people screwing up in small to medium ways (even IF the most massive screwups are 'forgiven' to devs who wouldn't have been able to pay anyway, but have twitter) I don't believe there will be any new services with better billing UX through competitive pressure. You're basically asking the competing thing to take less money in order to win, as the distinguishing factor. It doesn't make sense as a way for them to win against the larger thing taking more money. Probably the only practical solution would be arbitrary legislation forbidding the practice, as if it was anti-usury laws. Basically taking the guise of society and saying 'you may not do this, even if people are dumb'. And then you've got a problem (at scale) of people figuring out how to do hit-n-run megabilling and walking away under the legislation, having intentionally taken what they 'mistakenly' did. An 'oops, I accidentally a bitcoin' defense.
- davidgatti 5y ago
  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 monitor correctly. This way you can build a product the right way, not to mention AWS by default has limits on their services set with limits that prevent you from doing something incorrectly. For example you can only make 5000 requests a sec on the API Gateway, you can only have 1000 concurrent lambdas, you can spin only 25 ec2 instances, ecc... (true, not all services have limits like this - but then again, if you want to use one, the first thing you should do is check the pricing page, this is what I do fro every new service that I'm planing to use). 3. AWS is not for developers, it is meant for SysAdmins and DevOps (true that some marketing materials are not clear on this), they should be the one configuring it to allow developers to host their code. If you want a turn key solution, then there are better solutions, like Heroku - incredibly easy to use and understand and have a much simpler billing structure. With AWS you can do anything you want, AWS provides lego blocks, what do you build with it is up to your imaginations, and for sure it is not meant to be use directly by developers who have no idea how networks, computers, databases, cpu, ram, policies, storage etc works. Developers should focus on coding, and SysAdmins and DevOps should focus on managing the infrastructure. And if you want to learn AWS because you want to be a SysAdmin, then it is true, that AWS could have a plan for beginners with even smaller default limits, and limits set on everything - this way you could more safely play with what they have. This would be a nice things to have in this case for sure. But because they don't provide such thing, you need to be the responsible one, and start learning AWS the right way, and not get in gun blazing, and expect all will be ok. My recommendation is to learn one service at the time. If you do this, over the years the acquired knowledge will be gold. Plus the more services you learn the right way the easier it gets.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

puszczyk 5y ago

You can by insure for you as a driver and for your car (and in many jurisdictions have to) — this limits your responsibility. You can spend $10000 on AWS and still make a mistake and pay another $10k+. I don’t get the point that AWS docs are free. I mean, they are free, but the services are not. Do you pay for a visit in a car dealership?

dragonwriter 5y ago
> You can by insure for you as a driver and for your car (and in many jurisdictions have to) — this limits your responsibility Real insurance policies have maximum coverage limits, so, while it reduces your liability by a capped amount, it doesn’t, strictly speaking, limit it; you still face unbounded potential liability beyond your insurance coverage.
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  what's the biggest unexpected billing of AWS fees reported? I'm thinking 100,000 seems unlikely to be reached very often. on edit: this is not to say that I believe an insurance for this kind of thing would really work (although maybe that is because I know nothing about the insurance business) just that I don't think the problem with the insurance would be that you could always end up getting billed more than you were insured for.

ryan29 5y ago

> I need to stop blaming others and start owning my mistakes. There's a big difference between owning up to your mistakes and taking on a bunch of unnecessary risk in situations where you know it's more likely you're going to make mistakes. IE: Learning, testing, etc.. In fact taking on unnecessary, possibly unlimited financial risk in a situation like that is a mistake. Want to own that one?

onion2k 5y ago

Are you seriously suggesting that someone who wants to use AWS should go and read all the documentation and watch all the official videos available? That would take literally years. It's huge. It also doesn't solve the problem. If the user makes a mistake they still lose a ton of money. It's a really interesting problem. It's getting too big and too scary for a new developer to jump in and try AWS services, which means new devs will move on to newer services with better UX. I wonder if this sort of problem is one of the few existential threats AWS could actually face. Its possible it could end up as the Oracle or Salesforce of cloud services, very successful in enterprise but definitely not a good thing to have on your resume if you want to join a startup...

Applejinx 5y ago
I would not want to be the competing cloud service, with self-imposed limits of only what people are willing and expecting to pay, going up against Amazon (or any other cloud service of that scale) where they not only have scale already, but are being paid the extra money regularly by people screwing up in small to medium ways (even IF the most massive screwups are 'forgiven' to devs who wouldn't have been able to pay anyway, but have twitter) I don't believe there will be any new services with better billing UX through competitive pressure. You're basically asking the competing thing to take less money in order to win, as the distinguishing factor. It doesn't make sense as a way for them to win against the larger thing taking more money. Probably the only practical solution would be arbitrary legislation forbidding the practice, as if it was anti-usury laws. Basically taking the guise of society and saying 'you may not do this, even if people are dumb'. And then you've got a problem (at scale) of people figuring out how to do hit-n-run megabilling and walking away under the legislation, having intentionally taken what they 'mistakenly' did. An 'oops, I accidentally a bitcoin' defense.
davidgatti 5y ago
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 monitor correctly. This way you can build a product the right way, not to mention AWS by default has limits on their services set with limits that prevent you from doing something incorrectly. For example you can only make 5000 requests a sec on the API Gateway, you can only have 1000 concurrent lambdas, you can spin only 25 ec2 instances, ecc... (true, not all services have limits like this - but then again, if you want to use one, the first thing you should do is check the pricing page, this is what I do fro every new service that I'm planing to use). 3. AWS is not for developers, it is meant for SysAdmins and DevOps (true that some marketing materials are not clear on this), they should be the one configuring it to allow developers to host their code. If you want a turn key solution, then there are better solutions, like Heroku - incredibly easy to use and understand and have a much simpler billing structure. With AWS you can do anything you want, AWS provides lego blocks, what do you build with it is up to your imaginations, and for sure it is not meant to be use directly by developers who have no idea how networks, computers, databases, cpu, ram, policies, storage etc works. Developers should focus on coding, and SysAdmins and DevOps should focus on managing the infrastructure. And if you want to learn AWS because you want to be a SysAdmin, then it is true, that AWS could have a plan for beginners with even smaller default limits, and limits set on everything - this way you could more safely play with what they have. This would be a nice things to have in this case for sure. But because they don't provide such thing, you need to be the responsible one, and start learning AWS the right way, and not get in gun blazing, and expect all will be ok. My recommendation is to learn one service at the time. If you do this, over the years the acquired knowledge will be gold. Plus the more services you learn the right way the easier it gets.