6 ms·

> once you've worked a bit seriously with AWS Kind of a chicken-and-egg situation, no? Unless you're on the company dime, learning to work with AWS entails tha

by danjac 5y ago

> once you've worked a bit seriously with AWS Kind of a chicken-and-egg situation, no? Unless you're on the company dime, learning to work with AWS entails that risk. A beginner simply won't know how to configure all of these things.

RobRivera 5y ago
the risk is minimalized by reading the docs and proper planning. EDIT: got to love the holy downvoters
- danjac 5y ago
  That's the point though. A beginner is going to make mistakes and should be able to learn in a safe environment. Think of a student on a tight budget at college or in a bootcamp, who has to learn AWS because it's on the curriculum.
  - fleaaaa 5y ago
    Exactly, it's pretty common for them to shoot their own foot with a couple of hundred dollar bill, just for one tiny instance with additional options that 'you have to do'. IMO AWS is deliberately make these things happen and reimburse it later with excuses. It's rather a strategy at this point it seems like.
    - danjac 5y ago
      I don't think it's so much a money-grabbing strategy as the problem that AWS is less a suite of unified services and more a litter of puppies fighting in a sack. With that kind of org chart it's difficult to have a unified, simple billing experience with good beginner training-wheels and on-ramps.
      - geoduck14 5y ago
        >AWS is less a suite of unified services and more a litter of puppies fighting in a sack Can I quote you on this? I'm going to quote you.
  - _wldu 5y ago
    Doesn't the free tier cover a lot of what a student may want to do?
    - lmz 5y ago
      The free tier is just that, a tier (not a hard limit), and will not cover any use above the tier.
  - tenaciousDaniel 5y ago
    Yep. I'm a novice at AWS. Last year I heard about RDS, and tried playing around with it. I thought I had shut it down because I clicked some button that looked like it was the turn-off button. I let it go on for a few months, only to discover that I had been charged $1,500. The one thing that really pissed me off was how easy it was to set up vs how hard it was to take it back down. I can't remember the details, but basically you cannot simply turn off an RDS instance only in the UI (even though you can turn it on in the UI). You have to install the SDK and perform some (seemingly complex) commands. I tried explaining that I was a beginner, and that I made this mistake by accident, and that they could easily see that I had not actually used this instance at all or even put any data into the DB. But they wanted this huge list of things from me in order to refund it, like a super in-depth explanation of how it happened. Really shitty experience overall. So I canceled my AWS account and likely won't go back until I have a job that pays me to learn and use it.
    - scrose 5y ago
      You can ‘Stop’ a DB and ‘Terminate’ a DB through the UI. If you have deletion protection turned on, you can only stop the DB until it’s turned off, which can also be done through the UI. You most likely stopped the DB, but the problem there is that AWS will automatically turn on the DB after 7 days. You also still get charged for storage for the time your DB is off. Sorry to hear that though. I know it’s a really sucky situation to be in.
      - tenaciousDaniel 5y ago
        Ah yeah, I remember now. You could turn off the DB, but there was some other kind of scaffolding thing that I was still getting charged for. It seemed like an RDS-specific thing. They had to point me to a tutorial for turning that piece off.
        geoduck14 5y ago
        >You could turn off the DB, but there was some other kind of scaffolding thing that I was still getting charged for. It is a feature! /s
- triska 5y ago
  I did not downvote this, but I have a comment: The risk is not "minimalized by reading the docs and proper planning". To minimize something means to reduce it to the smallest possible amount, and I do not like to take any chances whatsoever when a huge excess bill is a possible outcome of a single misconfigured setting that can only be ruled out by reading hundreds if not thousands of pages of documentation and then following the documentation without mistake to the letter. There is a clear possible solution for reliably preventing any amount of unintended overpayment, and that would be to configure a hard billing limit that can never be exceeded, no matter what else is being configured. All services that generate additional costs would simply have to stop or be removed if the configured limit is exceeded. That would truly minimize the risk, because any configuration error I make will then not lead to excess payment if I configure such a limit and the cloud provider respects it.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  You're getting downvoted because you're victim blaming; a newbie shouldn't have to master anything to avoid a surprise bill.

by danjac 5y ago

RobRivera 5y ago

the risk is minimalized by reading the docs and proper planning. EDIT: got to love the holy downvoters

danjac 5y ago
That's the point though. A beginner is going to make mistakes and should be able to learn in a safe environment. Think of a student on a tight budget at college or in a bootcamp, who has to learn AWS because it's on the curriculum.
- fleaaaa 5y ago
  Exactly, it's pretty common for them to shoot their own foot with a couple of hundred dollar bill, just for one tiny instance with additional options that 'you have to do'. IMO AWS is deliberately make these things happen and reimburse it later with excuses. It's rather a strategy at this point it seems like.
  - danjac 5y ago
    I don't think it's so much a money-grabbing strategy as the problem that AWS is less a suite of unified services and more a litter of puppies fighting in a sack. With that kind of org chart it's difficult to have a unified, simple billing experience with good beginner training-wheels and on-ramps.
    - geoduck14 5y ago
      >AWS is less a suite of unified services and more a litter of puppies fighting in a sack Can I quote you on this? I'm going to quote you.
- _wldu 5y ago
  Doesn't the free tier cover a lot of what a student may want to do?
  - lmz 5y ago
    The free tier is just that, a tier (not a hard limit), and will not cover any use above the tier.
- tenaciousDaniel 5y ago
  Yep. I'm a novice at AWS. Last year I heard about RDS, and tried playing around with it. I thought I had shut it down because I clicked some button that looked like it was the turn-off button. I let it go on for a few months, only to discover that I had been charged $1,500. The one thing that really pissed me off was how easy it was to set up vs how hard it was to take it back down. I can't remember the details, but basically you cannot simply turn off an RDS instance only in the UI (even though you can turn it on in the UI). You have to install the SDK and perform some (seemingly complex) commands. I tried explaining that I was a beginner, and that I made this mistake by accident, and that they could easily see that I had not actually used this instance at all or even put any data into the DB. But they wanted this huge list of things from me in order to refund it, like a super in-depth explanation of how it happened. Really shitty experience overall. So I canceled my AWS account and likely won't go back until I have a job that pays me to learn and use it.
  - scrose 5y ago
    You can ‘Stop’ a DB and ‘Terminate’ a DB through the UI. If you have deletion protection turned on, you can only stop the DB until it’s turned off, which can also be done through the UI. You most likely stopped the DB, but the problem there is that AWS will automatically turn on the DB after 7 days. You also still get charged for storage for the time your DB is off. Sorry to hear that though. I know it’s a really sucky situation to be in.
    - tenaciousDaniel 5y ago
      Ah yeah, I remember now. You could turn off the DB, but there was some other kind of scaffolding thing that I was still getting charged for. It seemed like an RDS-specific thing. They had to point me to a tutorial for turning that piece off.
      - geoduck14 5y ago
        >You could turn off the DB, but there was some other kind of scaffolding thing that I was still getting charged for. It is a feature! /s
triska 5y ago
I did not downvote this, but I have a comment: The risk is not "minimalized by reading the docs and proper planning". To minimize something means to reduce it to the smallest possible amount, and I do not like to take any chances whatsoever when a huge excess bill is a possible outcome of a single misconfigured setting that can only be ruled out by reading hundreds if not thousands of pages of documentation and then following the documentation without mistake to the letter. There is a clear possible solution for reliably preventing any amount of unintended overpayment, and that would be to configure a hard billing limit that can never be exceeded, no matter what else is being configured. All services that generate additional costs would simply have to stop or be removed if the configured limit is exceeded. That would truly minimize the risk, because any configuration error I make will then not lead to excess payment if I configure such a limit and the cloud provider respects it.
yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
You're getting downvoted because you're victim blaming; a newbie shouldn't have to master anything to avoid a surprise bill.