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How do you deal with cloud anxiety? I've been always using bare metal servers, because I am afraid that when I set something up wrong on AWS I'll become bankrup

How do you deal with cloud anxiety? I've been always using bare metal servers, because I am afraid that when I set something up wrong on AWS I'll become bankrupt. When I had a few services running on AWS I often would wake up at night having a nightmare that my keys got stolen and someone run thousands on my account. After a few weeks like that I deleted everything from AWS. I have an account on GCP as I had to learn few things for my work assignment and I forgot to delete the setup - anyway a few months later I got an email that Google can't bill my account. I almost got a heart attack and then I noticed they couldn't bill $0 and my card simply expired - imagine the relief. When I wrote this I can see that maybe sounds stupid, but I have genuine fear of running anything on AWS, GCP or Azure etc. Another fear I have is that if I put a website online, someone could run a script to fetch content forever and make me pay huge bandwidth costs. When I last checked, there is no way to put any sort of caps e.g. when bandwidth cost exceeds certain amount it would deactivate the buckets etc. So what would you do? Nowadays very much every job lists knowledge of AWS as a requirement, but I can't get myself past the fear.

jiggawatts 4y ago
For training purposes, Azure has cost-limited subscriptions. Frustratingly, the other clouds have dragged their feet and largely refused to implement their own equivalents. This comes up here semi-regularly as one of the #1 complaints about the public cloud, and it's always hand-waved away by some Silicon Valley FAANG employee making half a million a year and using their parent company cloud account. I know of several ways it would be possible for a malicious actor to deliberately bankrupt a solo dev limited to a normal credit card budget. And as you've said, it's very fiddly and complicated to implement custom "stop" scripts, and this is futile anyway because the billing metrics in all clouds have huge delays on them. My $0.02 is try to learn using Azure first because there's a true safety net, and then use customer accounts to continue upskilling.
user432678 4y ago
Can completely relate to your situation. Basically, that’s the main reason I run everything on bare metal server, running in my basement. And use cloud providers only if my clients ready to pay for it or take risks.
pixl97 4y ago
There is nothing stupid about this fear at all. Having to fight a $20k mistake is highly stressful. Not being able to prevent it via policy is a design decision by the provider.

jiggawatts 4y ago

For training purposes, Azure has cost-limited subscriptions. Frustratingly, the other clouds have dragged their feet and largely refused to implement their own equivalents. This comes up here semi-regularly as one of the #1 complaints about the public cloud, and it's always hand-waved away by some Silicon Valley FAANG employee making half a million a year and using their parent company cloud account. I know of several ways it would be possible for a malicious actor to deliberately bankrupt a solo dev limited to a normal credit card budget. And as you've said, it's very fiddly and complicated to implement custom "stop" scripts, and this is futile anyway because the billing metrics in all clouds have huge delays on them. My $0.02 is try to learn using Azure first because there's a true safety net, and then use customer accounts to continue upskilling.

user432678 4y ago

Can completely relate to your situation. Basically, that’s the main reason I run everything on bare metal server, running in my basement. And use cloud providers only if my clients ready to pay for it or take risks.

pixl97 4y ago

There is nothing stupid about this fear at all. Having to fight a $20k mistake is highly stressful. Not being able to prevent it via policy is a design decision by the provider.