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AWS Purity Test

134 points by notamy 4y ago

neogodless 4y ago
I've done very little with AWS for two reasons - haven't had any projects/work where they used it, and personally... Several years ago I signed up for a free tier account with AWS to play with . But I also didn't know what I was going to do with it - I didn't create any resources. Got distracted, a few weeks went by, they sent me an invoice! It wasn't for much, but it was not $0. I was very confused (and never figured out why I was charged). Fortunately I was able to reach customer service and get the costs dropped, and I promptly closed my account so that I didn't accidentally (through no action of my own) accumulate further charges! I'd like to see "get charged more than expected" or "think you were on the free tier but somehow you weren't" on this purity test. EDIT: OK either "free tier" was added just now or I fat-fingered "free" when I searched for it earlier :)
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  The saying I've seen is "never learn AWS/cloud on your own credit card".
  - anakaine 4y ago
    I'll second this. It's fantastic advice.
- WrtCdEvrydy 4y ago
  Your score: 68 The reason I don't like AWS is because billing is always at least like 24 hours behind. By time you realize you don't goofed, the bill's already probably more than you thought.
  - imwillofficial 4y ago
    It’s because your estimated bill is calculated every night
- IMSAI8080 4y ago
  The blank cheque billing is one of the reasons I don't use AWS for any personal project either i.e. they do not allow you to set a hard account cost limit. The billing approach makes AWS scary to learn on your own time as you don't know if you're going to get a huge charge from clicking some button or other you didn't understand properly. I deal with AWS reps for business and they don't seem to perceive it as a problem when I have mentioned it (or don't want to do anything about it).
  - orf 4y ago
    They don’t perceive it as a problem because it’s not a problem. You getting charged 25$ by accident is not even worth thinking about considering adding a meeting to discuss potentially adding a ticket to a jira board. If you want fixed charges use AWS amplify or another service built on AWS primitives. But the whole reason for using AWS is flexibility and “pay for what you use”. If you don’t understand what a button does then don’t press it until you understand it?
    - IMSAI8080 4y ago
      Flexibility and pay-as-you-go has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the capability to set an account hard cost limit. If AWS wanted to add such a feature they could do. They obviously don't for their own commercial reasons. It is very easy on AWS to make mistakes and it's off putting to people like me who do not have unlimited budgets as clearly you do.
      - wahnfrieden 4y ago
        attacks are frequent, and then you gotta deal with waiting on aws to confirm it was an attack and refund etc. it's easy to avoid attacks with best practices but the fact stands that they are still common in customer accounts and then you have a financial risk on top of the attack risk.
      - orf 4y ago
        It absolutely does have everything to do with it. How would this actually work? Actually think a bit about how hard it would be to add a global, synchronised and immediate view of an accounts cost and check it on every single API call. Take S3 for example: you set a 1$ limit then concurrently upload 10 1$ per month files. What happens? Should 9 of those uploads fail? How would you ever synchronise that? Or perhaps they complete, but should the bucket delete the contents after the ”storage cost per hour” limit is reached? Perhaps you could reconcile the account cost usage every hour, and when reached the account should be locked somehow and no new writes or reads can be done on anything. Which is basically breaking the account and everything that runs on it. Most people don’t want that. How would it even work with bandwidth? You’re serving a file from S3 or EC2 with your 10$ account limit. What happens after you use 10$ bandwidth? Should your accounts external internet connection be cut off? How would you even calculate that cost in real time at scale. Use your brain. AWS are not stupid. It’s a minefield of complexity that would be super expensive to implement and that benefits nobody. The “if you mess up we will refund you up to 2 times” policy works absolutely fine.
devin 4y ago
Is this a clever advertisement for antimetal.com? I'd never heard of it.
- harrylucas 4y ago
  Yeah instantly my thought. Also since it’s only in “request access” mode it’s not something that can be ticked off eg not really apart of the list. Also the landing page for it feels like it’s written in the same style. Definitely not against advertising the product but make it more explicit
- QuinnyPig 4y ago
  Yes. That said, I'm vaguely amused at the concept (I got a 23), but they also misspelled my name (Corey) and the name of the newsletter (Last Week in AWS, not "This Week"). I also have some quibbles about a few of the questions, but that's probably no surprise...
  - apnew 4y ago
    Corey, just wanted to let you know I really appreciate your work. You have been a great source of knowledge over past few years.
    - brazzledazzle 4y ago
      Would also like to affirm that same sentiment.
      - QuinnyPig 4y ago
        That is incredibly kind of both of you; thanks! I don't hear that nearly as often as most people suspect I do...
    - Corrado 4y ago
      Ditto! I read very few emails/blogs, but I always read through "Last Week In AWS" fully. I even have the t-shirt!
latchkey 4y ago
A play on the original: http://ricepuritytest.com/ http://ricepuritytest.com/
- shagie 4y ago
  My first thought was "surely the hacker purity test predates that" ... and then I did a little bit of searching. The Hacker Purity Test is from '89... http://www.armory.com/tests/hacker.html http://www.armory.com/tests/hacker.html But it turns out that the Rice Purity Test will be celebrating its 100th anniversary next year. https://lhsepic.com/6806/opinion/3_op_ricepuritypranavm/ https://lhsepic.com/6806/opinion/3_op_ricepuritypranavm/ > The Rice Purity Test is a survey first administered by Rice University in 1924. The test asks 100 yes-or-no questions to output a numerical score, with 100 being the “most pure” and 0 being completely “impure.” The first test was given only to women in order for Rice to gauge how risqué their female population was. It often resulted in shaming: women with scores below 70 were often viewed as immoral, whereas those with scores above 90 were seen as uptight. The test has since become popular worldwide, despite retaining its most fundamental problem: it reduces test-takers’ complex experiences to a single numerical value.
  - latchkey 4y ago
    Correct. I did the same search before I posted it. =) Side note, I remember finding one of the dirtier purity tests on usenet after I got onto the internet in `91. Just being fresh in college at that point, a few of the terms used were new to me. hahahahah.
- rodface 4y ago
  Were we (Rice U) really the original? :)
- an-allen 4y ago
  Ah that’s freaking great. I remember taking the purity test when I matriculated to Rice (decades ago). I remember having one of the lower scores amongst the good folk, but not obscene. Something like maybe a 50 or so… always good to see how one is progressing on their goals. Click click click… ouch an 18.
mattficke 4y ago
> Has complained about the AWS UI at a party? Good to know it’s not just me (but seriously, the way they’ve implemented search in paginated results is the most actively hostile UX decision I’ve ever encountered. It’s so bad it almost makes me feel better about the half-baked hacky stuff I’ve done over the years.)
- AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  I will offer a very tepid "I've seen worse" for AWS's UI considering all the things it has to support. That said, the redesign made it worse (those scroll windows that don't fill up the pane... MY GOD HOW DO YOU NOT FIX THAT), there is no sense of continual improvement and addition of useful new features and views, performance is pretty bad. All I ever hear "you're not supposed to use the UI, you're supposed to use the API". Don't get me started on the API. This quiz is missing these three key points: - has culled 1,000$ annual savings in a AWS cost saving review? - has culled 10,000$ annual savings in an AWS cost saving review? - has culled 100,000$ ? - has culled 1,000,000$? I ... almost .. got to 1,000,000 once. - trapped AWS support in an outright lie? - gotten AWS support to tell you results of hidden internal metrics to debug something?
  - jackson1442 4y ago
    > Don't get me started on the API. At least it's not the GCP API. Had to use that for some compliance automation once and still have nightmares about it.
    - kccqzy 4y ago
      Why not use the CLI though? The aws and gcloud CLI tools seem fine when I occasionally use them.
      - jackson1442 4y ago
        Ah, read API as CLI (with AWS they're essentially the same). The biggest problem with GCP's api/cli/sdk/console is they're not the same. There are things you can only do in the console, or have different grammars across CLI/SDK, or have different permission schemes across them. Add to that the intermixing of "IT Admin" and "Cloud Admin" roles due to all of your Google Groups also being IAM groups, and IAM being somehow tied into your G Suite admin area, it's just a confusing mess. With AWS, the CLI is the API is the SDK. So if you can use one, you can use all of them very easily.
csmattryder 4y ago
> Has woken up in the middle of the night to a billing alert email? I went through an awful period of on-call at my last place, and seeing "Amazon" come through on the work email shocked me awake thinking it's another CloudWatch alert, only to blearily see it was the regular end-of-month statement. You get the same feeling when you wake up before your alarm and you think you overslept, but now you can't get back to sleep for the adrenaline in the blood.
- pnathan 4y ago
  when you have work and personal email on your phone and you have your own aws account and the work finance department screws up and you get an email from aws with a > 100K owed bit of information.... that was a moment of panic.
StratusBen 4y ago
As someone who has spent the greater part of the last 3 years working on AWS UX or billing related things....this hits incredibly too close to home. Also, for anyone waking up in the middle of the night on billing alert emails, this is why a lot of folks are using https://www.vantage.sh/ https://www.vantage.sh/
dekhn 4y ago
I'm disappointed there wasn't a specific entry for "sat on a beach in Hawaii on Christmas vacation having a 3-way email with the CEO of my startup (who is sitting on a beach in Tahiti) and an AWS contract person to finalize the signing of a 3-year multi-million dollar contract". That's what I did.
nonethewiser 4y ago
Once you click "Calculate My Score" there is no way to go back to the test. There is no back button, and not links on screen.
upon_drumhead 4y ago
> Complained about an AWS region going down more than your S/O? We (society) really need to move beyond making these lame jokes. They weren’t funny in the 80’s, 90’s, 00’s, or the 10’s…
- mparkhurst 4y ago
  Fair point, fixed. We took inspiration from the original Rice Purity Test, which is very NSFW, but missed the mark on this.
- SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
  People liking their genitals licked is older than the 1980s, and isn't going away.
- Idk__Throwaway 4y ago
  Society doesn't need to change just because you don't like this specific sub-genre of joke. Romantic partnership, and subsequent occasional annoyance with said partner, is an almost universally shared human experience.
  - PartiallyTyped 4y ago
    Maybe we should consider the context before we crack a joke.
  - scubbo 4y ago
    a) you are (wrongly) assuming that this one person is the only person who dislikes this type of joke. You could make this same (wrong) argument to discount literally any suggestion or criticism - "you are the only person who feels this way, therefore no". b) just because something is common or widespread, doesn't mean it should be normalized or treated as "the best that it can be". That's a highly conservative (in the non-US-political sense) and neophobic viewpoint - not what I would expect on Hacker News. Reduction of a S/O to a sex-provider might be common among certain social groups, but that's not the society I dream of.
    - 4y ago
dark-star 4y ago
I remember back in the 90s lots of these purity tests circulated on AOL and elsewhere on the 'net. I thknk there was at least a "geek purity test" and a "programmer purity test".. and maybe a "UNIX purity test"? Not sure. They were all quite funny though (at least my younger self thought so)
hansvm 4y ago
While we're joking about AWS adventures, has anyone here seriously contemplated using S3 keys as a cheap blob store? It looks like they're a generous kilobyte a pop, and prefix queries are supported, so you could hypothetically chunk your data into a [key|index|data_index| scheme and store a bunch of empty files in slightly under 1KB chunks -- ingress is nearly free (API calls, though you can batch them to keep this from being terrible), egress is expensive, and storage is free. Does that work?
- csunbird 4y ago
  That is why you also pay per request :)
- berkle4455 4y ago
  This is a terrible idea. S3 charges $0.005 per 1,000 PUT operations. So let's say you want to store 1GB (1e9 bytes) 1,000 bytes at a time, that's 1,000,000 keys. $0.005 * (1,000,000 PUT operations / 1,000) = $5.00 to write 1GB. The on-going storage cost I believe would be free since the files themselves are empty. Meanwhile writing a single 1GB file to S3? Costs you $0.023 per month storage, and the single write cost is $0.000005. It'll take 217 months to cost $5.00
  - scarface74 4y ago
    Trivia: this API is I believe the only documented time that AWS has ever raised prices. It was done just for that reason.
    - dexterdog 4y ago
      If you track the extortion that AWS charges for egress bandwidth against both inflation and what bandwidth costs on average then they are always raising that rate.
    - QuinnyPig 4y ago
      They changed the pricing dimension when it was in beta. They've also raised SNS prices in some markets where regulatory fees increased, boosted pricing for domain registration several times, redid the pricing model for IoT Core when it was in beta, and changed the pricing model for AWS Config in ways that are kinda... unfortunate, for a lot of us.
gumby271 4y ago
> Uses AWS console in dark mode? I'm sorry, there's a dark mode for the console!?
- burkaman 4y ago
  Just introduced in October. https://{region}.console.aws.amazon.com/settings/home?region={region}#/display/edit https://{region}.console.aws.amazon.com/settings/home?region...
- dexterdog 4y ago
  Not sure why you should get points for toggling a config. The points should be for not using the console.
ctvo 4y ago
Please please please make it so labels also trigger the checkbox. No one has time to click your 5x5 pixel box.
- zamadatix 4y ago
  <tab> + <space> ftw (and god help those on mobile).
  - T00TH3M00N 4y ago
    [dead]
- rmbyrro 4y ago
  [ ] You're anxious to click all 5x5 checkboxes on this page -- done, you've achieved maximum AWS purity!
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
ok123456 4y ago
I'd rather be in control of my product and deployments rather than deal with all this nonsense.
- Spivak 4y ago
  On-prem gal turned AWS because people don't hire you without cloud. It's not as bad as I had assumed. It sure is a lot of bullshit but no different than working on-prem, just different kinds of bullshit. Like how-fucking-dare RDS use DNS for failover instead of ARP so it's impossible to do instant non-user-visible recovery.
keepquestioning 4y ago
[dead]
firesteelrain 4y ago
Can we have one of these for Azure?
oxfordmale 4y ago
FYI, my teenage daughter informed me this is a parody on a Purity Test going around at secondary schools. That purity tests is regarding romantic relationships and all its aspects.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  No, a "purity test" can be on any topic really and has been going on at least since I remember in the late 80s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purity_test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purity_test
  - ladberg 4y ago
    The website is a direct parody of http://ricepuritytest.com http://ricepuritytest.com (Warning: NSFW text)
    - hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
      There have been many "purity tests" before and after that one in the exact same format, that one is just perhaps the most well known so the author copied the format.
  - oxfordmale 4y ago
    Thanks for the clarification. As I didn't grow up in the Anglo-Saxon-speaking part of the world, it was a novel concept to me.
- rconti 4y ago
  I'm just impressed kids these days are keeping it alive
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
deleted 4y ago
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azurezyq 4y ago
Add one: Got to know that cross AZ traffic is double charged (OUT and IN), making it twice as expensive as GCP.
- willthames 4y ago
  Cross AZ traffic became free in April last year https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2022/04/aws-data-transfer-price-reduction-privatelink-transit-gateway-client-vpn-services/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2022/04/aws-data-...
  - azurezyq 4y ago
    That's for private link. Direct transfers in the same VPC are still $0.02/GB (in+out). Privatelink has to be used together with an LB, which is not free (hourly+byte processed)
tuankiet65 4y ago
Needs one where you tried to scale up before realizing you had to up your quota.
KingMachiavelli 4y ago
Am I the only one that likes the AWS console interface UI? My only complaint is that some features/products don't really have a UI or require you to manually create the internal IAM role before you can use it. IMO it's a better UI than O365/Azure and I don't have much experience with Gcloud to say much but they seem about equal but still leaning towards AWS as the best UI of the top 3 cloud providers.
- sylens 4y ago
  I've come to much prefer GCP's interface
- antihero 4y ago
  Surely the console is only for experimentation and checking on things? I figured anything proper should be done in a reproducible way (IaaC like Terraform/CDK/CF)
- jnsaff2 4y ago
  Azure web ui developers are actually proud of their claim that it is in their opinion the largest SPA in the world. If that is your comparison then AWS Console is amazing. In general tho, AWS Console is OK at best, it does the job and for some services it is actually good. Many services are awful tho.
  - rurp 4y ago
    OMG, as bad as the AWS console is, Azure is much worse. The convoluted interface is bad enough, but the SPA warts make it even worse. Not supporting basic browser functionality like tabs is awful.
brightball 4y ago
> Got Covid at re:Invent I'm a little bummed there wasn't a "didn't get covid at re:Invent" option...
- dexterdog 4y ago
  I was surprised it didn't have things about the number of reinvents attended. I only went to the first one and it was enough of a zoo that has only gotten zoo-ier so I have not been interested in going again. It was certainly worthwhile at the time, but I can't imagine how over-loaded they are now.
mgkimsal 4y ago
I got a 94. :/
sjducb 4y ago
I got 76, I have no idea how good/bad that is. You could put a histogram of the results and show where the player is on the histogram.
ChicagoDave 4y ago
89 here. Less of an engineer and more LucidChart drawing architect though.
nmandvi 4y ago
96 here...lol
OnlyRepliesToBS 4y ago
[dead]
philpot1 4y ago
I got a 64, but the UI on this site is reflective of the AWS UI. But very cool idea
STRML 4y ago
We have a unique one: back before the z1d launched, we had a critical system that was very single-threaded and its performance drove revenue in an extremely direct way. So we were, deep in the shit, fighting fires due to our systems being in a perpetual state of DoS, and we asked if they would rack a machine with a certain overclocked Skylake chip in it. We offered 7 figures to do it. It was worth that much to us to get ~40% more capacity without having to migrate off AWS. They said no :)
aflukasz 4y ago
86 Random reflection: Key to AWS costs is to always assume every compute, storage or networking unit incurs cost. Always. Then got to (a) pricing of the service in question, (b) FAQ of the service, (c) pricing and FAQ for EC2 specifically and scan for every pricing information you can. If after that you can be 100% sure something does not incur cost, only then you are allowed to remove it from your financial model of what you want to deploy. You do have a financial model, right?
alephu5 4y ago
I got a 96 and am pleased with that. I have serious concerns about Amazon as a company, they're too big and predatory. I've been using AWS at various companies and have tried to embrace its paradigms but I hate them.

134 points by notamy 4y ago

I've done very little with AWS for two reasons - haven't had any projects/work where they used it, and personally... Several years ago I signed up for a free tier account with AWS to play with . But I also didn't know what I was going to do with it - I didn't create any resources. Got distracted, a few weeks went by, they sent me an invoice! It wasn't for much, but it was not $0. I was very confused (and never figured out why I was charged). Fortunately I was able to reach customer service and get the costs dropped, and I promptly closed my account so that I didn't accidentally (through no action of my own) accumulate further charges! I'd like to see "get charged more than expected" or "think you were on the free tier but somehow you weren't" on this purity test. EDIT: OK either "free tier" was added just now or I fat-fingered "free" when I searched for it earlier :)

hotpotamus 4y ago
The saying I've seen is "never learn AWS/cloud on your own credit card".
- anakaine 4y ago
  I'll second this. It's fantastic advice.
WrtCdEvrydy 4y ago
Your score: 68 The reason I don't like AWS is because billing is always at least like 24 hours behind. By time you realize you don't goofed, the bill's already probably more than you thought.
- imwillofficial 4y ago
  It’s because your estimated bill is calculated every night
IMSAI8080 4y ago
The blank cheque billing is one of the reasons I don't use AWS for any personal project either i.e. they do not allow you to set a hard account cost limit. The billing approach makes AWS scary to learn on your own time as you don't know if you're going to get a huge charge from clicking some button or other you didn't understand properly. I deal with AWS reps for business and they don't seem to perceive it as a problem when I have mentioned it (or don't want to do anything about it).
- orf 4y ago
  They don’t perceive it as a problem because it’s not a problem. You getting charged 25$ by accident is not even worth thinking about considering adding a meeting to discuss potentially adding a ticket to a jira board. If you want fixed charges use AWS amplify or another service built on AWS primitives. But the whole reason for using AWS is flexibility and “pay for what you use”. If you don’t understand what a button does then don’t press it until you understand it?
  - IMSAI8080 4y ago
    Flexibility and pay-as-you-go has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the capability to set an account hard cost limit. If AWS wanted to add such a feature they could do. They obviously don't for their own commercial reasons. It is very easy on AWS to make mistakes and it's off putting to people like me who do not have unlimited budgets as clearly you do.
    - wahnfrieden 4y ago
      attacks are frequent, and then you gotta deal with waiting on aws to confirm it was an attack and refund etc. it's easy to avoid attacks with best practices but the fact stands that they are still common in customer accounts and then you have a financial risk on top of the attack risk.
    - orf 4y ago
      It absolutely does have everything to do with it. How would this actually work? Actually think a bit about how hard it would be to add a global, synchronised and immediate view of an accounts cost and check it on every single API call. Take S3 for example: you set a 1$ limit then concurrently upload 10 1$ per month files. What happens? Should 9 of those uploads fail? How would you ever synchronise that? Or perhaps they complete, but should the bucket delete the contents after the ”storage cost per hour” limit is reached? Perhaps you could reconcile the account cost usage every hour, and when reached the account should be locked somehow and no new writes or reads can be done on anything. Which is basically breaking the account and everything that runs on it. Most people don’t want that. How would it even work with bandwidth? You’re serving a file from S3 or EC2 with your 10$ account limit. What happens after you use 10$ bandwidth? Should your accounts external internet connection be cut off? How would you even calculate that cost in real time at scale. Use your brain. AWS are not stupid. It’s a minefield of complexity that would be super expensive to implement and that benefits nobody. The “if you mess up we will refund you up to 2 times” policy works absolutely fine.

devin 4y ago

Is this a clever advertisement for antimetal.com? I'd never heard of it.

harrylucas 4y ago
Yeah instantly my thought. Also since it’s only in “request access” mode it’s not something that can be ticked off eg not really apart of the list. Also the landing page for it feels like it’s written in the same style. Definitely not against advertising the product but make it more explicit
QuinnyPig 4y ago
Yes. That said, I'm vaguely amused at the concept (I got a 23), but they also misspelled my name (Corey) and the name of the newsletter (Last Week in AWS, not "This Week"). I also have some quibbles about a few of the questions, but that's probably no surprise...
- apnew 4y ago
  Corey, just wanted to let you know I really appreciate your work. You have been a great source of knowledge over past few years.
  - brazzledazzle 4y ago
    Would also like to affirm that same sentiment.
    - QuinnyPig 4y ago
      That is incredibly kind of both of you; thanks! I don't hear that nearly as often as most people suspect I do...
  - Corrado 4y ago
    Ditto! I read very few emails/blogs, but I always read through "Last Week In AWS" fully. I even have the t-shirt!

latchkey 4y ago

A play on the original: http://ricepuritytest.com/ http://ricepuritytest.com/

shagie 4y ago
My first thought was "surely the hacker purity test predates that" ... and then I did a little bit of searching. The Hacker Purity Test is from '89... http://www.armory.com/tests/hacker.html http://www.armory.com/tests/hacker.html But it turns out that the Rice Purity Test will be celebrating its 100th anniversary next year. https://lhsepic.com/6806/opinion/3_op_ricepuritypranavm/ https://lhsepic.com/6806/opinion/3_op_ricepuritypranavm/ > The Rice Purity Test is a survey first administered by Rice University in 1924. The test asks 100 yes-or-no questions to output a numerical score, with 100 being the “most pure” and 0 being completely “impure.” The first test was given only to women in order for Rice to gauge how risqué their female population was. It often resulted in shaming: women with scores below 70 were often viewed as immoral, whereas those with scores above 90 were seen as uptight. The test has since become popular worldwide, despite retaining its most fundamental problem: it reduces test-takers’ complex experiences to a single numerical value.
- latchkey 4y ago
  Correct. I did the same search before I posted it. =) Side note, I remember finding one of the dirtier purity tests on usenet after I got onto the internet in `91. Just being fresh in college at that point, a few of the terms used were new to me. hahahahah.
rodface 4y ago
Were we (Rice U) really the original? :)
an-allen 4y ago
Ah that’s freaking great. I remember taking the purity test when I matriculated to Rice (decades ago). I remember having one of the lower scores amongst the good folk, but not obscene. Something like maybe a 50 or so… always good to see how one is progressing on their goals. Click click click… ouch an 18.

mattficke 4y ago

> Has complained about the AWS UI at a party? Good to know it’s not just me (but seriously, the way they’ve implemented search in paginated results is the most actively hostile UX decision I’ve ever encountered. It’s so bad it almost makes me feel better about the half-baked hacky stuff I’ve done over the years.)

AtlasBarfed 4y ago
I will offer a very tepid "I've seen worse" for AWS's UI considering all the things it has to support. That said, the redesign made it worse (those scroll windows that don't fill up the pane... MY GOD HOW DO YOU NOT FIX THAT), there is no sense of continual improvement and addition of useful new features and views, performance is pretty bad. All I ever hear "you're not supposed to use the UI, you're supposed to use the API". Don't get me started on the API. This quiz is missing these three key points: - has culled 1,000$ annual savings in a AWS cost saving review? - has culled 10,000$ annual savings in an AWS cost saving review? - has culled 100,000$ ? - has culled 1,000,000$? I ... almost .. got to 1,000,000 once. - trapped AWS support in an outright lie? - gotten AWS support to tell you results of hidden internal metrics to debug something?
- jackson1442 4y ago
  > Don't get me started on the API. At least it's not the GCP API. Had to use that for some compliance automation once and still have nightmares about it.
  - kccqzy 4y ago
    Why not use the CLI though? The aws and gcloud CLI tools seem fine when I occasionally use them.
    - jackson1442 4y ago
      Ah, read API as CLI (with AWS they're essentially the same). The biggest problem with GCP's api/cli/sdk/console is they're not the same. There are things you can only do in the console, or have different grammars across CLI/SDK, or have different permission schemes across them. Add to that the intermixing of "IT Admin" and "Cloud Admin" roles due to all of your Google Groups also being IAM groups, and IAM being somehow tied into your G Suite admin area, it's just a confusing mess. With AWS, the CLI is the API is the SDK. So if you can use one, you can use all of them very easily.

csmattryder 4y ago

> Has woken up in the middle of the night to a billing alert email? I went through an awful period of on-call at my last place, and seeing "Amazon" come through on the work email shocked me awake thinking it's another CloudWatch alert, only to blearily see it was the regular end-of-month statement. You get the same feeling when you wake up before your alarm and you think you overslept, but now you can't get back to sleep for the adrenaline in the blood.

pnathan 4y ago
when you have work and personal email on your phone and you have your own aws account and the work finance department screws up and you get an email from aws with a > 100K owed bit of information.... that was a moment of panic.

StratusBen 4y ago

As someone who has spent the greater part of the last 3 years working on AWS UX or billing related things....this hits incredibly too close to home. Also, for anyone waking up in the middle of the night on billing alert emails, this is why a lot of folks are using https://www.vantage.sh/ https://www.vantage.sh/

dekhn 4y ago

I'm disappointed there wasn't a specific entry for "sat on a beach in Hawaii on Christmas vacation having a 3-way email with the CEO of my startup (who is sitting on a beach in Tahiti) and an AWS contract person to finalize the signing of a 3-year multi-million dollar contract". That's what I did.

nonethewiser 4y ago

Once you click "Calculate My Score" there is no way to go back to the test. There is no back button, and not links on screen.

upon_drumhead 4y ago

> Complained about an AWS region going down more than your S/O? We (society) really need to move beyond making these lame jokes. They weren’t funny in the 80’s, 90’s, 00’s, or the 10’s…

mparkhurst 4y ago
Fair point, fixed. We took inspiration from the original Rice Purity Test, which is very NSFW, but missed the mark on this.
SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
People liking their genitals licked is older than the 1980s, and isn't going away.
Idk__Throwaway 4y ago
Society doesn't need to change just because you don't like this specific sub-genre of joke. Romantic partnership, and subsequent occasional annoyance with said partner, is an almost universally shared human experience.
- PartiallyTyped 4y ago
  Maybe we should consider the context before we crack a joke.
- scubbo 4y ago
  a) you are (wrongly) assuming that this one person is the only person who dislikes this type of joke. You could make this same (wrong) argument to discount literally any suggestion or criticism - "you are the only person who feels this way, therefore no". b) just because something is common or widespread, doesn't mean it should be normalized or treated as "the best that it can be". That's a highly conservative (in the non-US-political sense) and neophobic viewpoint - not what I would expect on Hacker News. Reduction of a S/O to a sex-provider might be common among certain social groups, but that's not the society I dream of.
  - 4y ago

dark-star 4y ago

I remember back in the 90s lots of these purity tests circulated on AOL and elsewhere on the 'net. I thknk there was at least a "geek purity test" and a "programmer purity test".. and maybe a "UNIX purity test"? Not sure. They were all quite funny though (at least my younger self thought so)

hansvm 4y ago

While we're joking about AWS adventures, has anyone here seriously contemplated using S3 keys as a cheap blob store? It looks like they're a generous kilobyte a pop, and prefix queries are supported, so you could hypothetically chunk your data into a [key|index|data_index| scheme and store a bunch of empty files in slightly under 1KB chunks -- ingress is nearly free (API calls, though you can batch them to keep this from being terrible), egress is expensive, and storage is free. Does that work?

csunbird 4y ago
That is why you also pay per request :)
berkle4455 4y ago
This is a terrible idea. S3 charges $0.005 per 1,000 PUT operations. So let's say you want to store 1GB (1e9 bytes) 1,000 bytes at a time, that's 1,000,000 keys. $0.005 * (1,000,000 PUT operations / 1,000) = $5.00 to write 1GB. The on-going storage cost I believe would be free since the files themselves are empty. Meanwhile writing a single 1GB file to S3? Costs you $0.023 per month storage, and the single write cost is $0.000005. It'll take 217 months to cost $5.00
- scarface74 4y ago
  Trivia: this API is I believe the only documented time that AWS has ever raised prices. It was done just for that reason.
  - dexterdog 4y ago
    If you track the extortion that AWS charges for egress bandwidth against both inflation and what bandwidth costs on average then they are always raising that rate.
  - QuinnyPig 4y ago
    They changed the pricing dimension when it was in beta. They've also raised SNS prices in some markets where regulatory fees increased, boosted pricing for domain registration several times, redid the pricing model for IoT Core when it was in beta, and changed the pricing model for AWS Config in ways that are kinda... unfortunate, for a lot of us.

gumby271 4y ago

> Uses AWS console in dark mode? I'm sorry, there's a dark mode for the console!?

burkaman 4y ago
Just introduced in October. https://{region}.console.aws.amazon.com/settings/home?region={region}#/display/edit https://{region}.console.aws.amazon.com/settings/home?region...
dexterdog 4y ago
Not sure why you should get points for toggling a config. The points should be for not using the console.

ctvo 4y ago

Please please please make it so labels also trigger the checkbox. No one has time to click your 5x5 pixel box.

zamadatix 4y ago
<tab> + <space> ftw (and god help those on mobile).
- T00TH3M00N 4y ago
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rmbyrro 4y ago
[ ] You're anxious to click all 5x5 checkboxes on this page -- done, you've achieved maximum AWS purity!
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ok123456 4y ago

I'd rather be in control of my product and deployments rather than deal with all this nonsense.

Spivak 4y ago
On-prem gal turned AWS because people don't hire you without cloud. It's not as bad as I had assumed. It sure is a lot of bullshit but no different than working on-prem, just different kinds of bullshit. Like how-fucking-dare RDS use DNS for failover instead of ARP so it's impossible to do instant non-user-visible recovery.

keepquestioning 4y ago

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firesteelrain 4y ago

Can we have one of these for Azure?

oxfordmale 4y ago

FYI, my teenage daughter informed me this is a parody on a Purity Test going around at secondary schools. That purity tests is regarding romantic relationships and all its aspects.

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hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
No, a "purity test" can be on any topic really and has been going on at least since I remember in the late 80s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purity_test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purity_test
- ladberg 4y ago
  The website is a direct parody of http://ricepuritytest.com http://ricepuritytest.com (Warning: NSFW text)
  - hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
    There have been many "purity tests" before and after that one in the exact same format, that one is just perhaps the most well known so the author copied the format.
- oxfordmale 4y ago
  Thanks for the clarification. As I didn't grow up in the Anglo-Saxon-speaking part of the world, it was a novel concept to me.
rconti 4y ago
I'm just impressed kids these days are keeping it alive
- deleted 4y ago
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azurezyq 4y ago

Add one: Got to know that cross AZ traffic is double charged (OUT and IN), making it twice as expensive as GCP.

willthames 4y ago
Cross AZ traffic became free in April last year https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2022/04/aws-data-transfer-price-reduction-privatelink-transit-gateway-client-vpn-services/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2022/04/aws-data-...
- azurezyq 4y ago
  That's for private link. Direct transfers in the same VPC are still $0.02/GB (in+out). Privatelink has to be used together with an LB, which is not free (hourly+byte processed)

tuankiet65 4y ago

Needs one where you tried to scale up before realizing you had to up your quota.

KingMachiavelli 4y ago

Am I the only one that likes the AWS console interface UI? My only complaint is that some features/products don't really have a UI or require you to manually create the internal IAM role before you can use it. IMO it's a better UI than O365/Azure and I don't have much experience with Gcloud to say much but they seem about equal but still leaning towards AWS as the best UI of the top 3 cloud providers.

sylens 4y ago
I've come to much prefer GCP's interface
antihero 4y ago
Surely the console is only for experimentation and checking on things? I figured anything proper should be done in a reproducible way (IaaC like Terraform/CDK/CF)
jnsaff2 4y ago
Azure web ui developers are actually proud of their claim that it is in their opinion the largest SPA in the world. If that is your comparison then AWS Console is amazing. In general tho, AWS Console is OK at best, it does the job and for some services it is actually good. Many services are awful tho.
- rurp 4y ago
  OMG, as bad as the AWS console is, Azure is much worse. The convoluted interface is bad enough, but the SPA warts make it even worse. Not supporting basic browser functionality like tabs is awful.

brightball 4y ago

> Got Covid at re:Invent I'm a little bummed there wasn't a "didn't get covid at re:Invent" option...

dexterdog 4y ago
I was surprised it didn't have things about the number of reinvents attended. I only went to the first one and it was enough of a zoo that has only gotten zoo-ier so I have not been interested in going again. It was certainly worthwhile at the time, but I can't imagine how over-loaded they are now.

mgkimsal 4y ago

I got a 94. :/

sjducb 4y ago

I got 76, I have no idea how good/bad that is. You could put a histogram of the results and show where the player is on the histogram.

ChicagoDave 4y ago

89 here. Less of an engineer and more LucidChart drawing architect though.

nmandvi 4y ago

96 here...lol

OnlyRepliesToBS 4y ago

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philpot1 4y ago

I got a 64, but the UI on this site is reflective of the AWS UI. But very cool idea

STRML 4y ago

We have a unique one: back before the z1d launched, we had a critical system that was very single-threaded and its performance drove revenue in an extremely direct way. So we were, deep in the shit, fighting fires due to our systems being in a perpetual state of DoS, and we asked if they would rack a machine with a certain overclocked Skylake chip in it. We offered 7 figures to do it. It was worth that much to us to get ~40% more capacity without having to migrate off AWS. They said no :)

aflukasz 4y ago

86 Random reflection: Key to AWS costs is to always assume every compute, storage or networking unit incurs cost. Always. Then got to (a) pricing of the service in question, (b) FAQ of the service, (c) pricing and FAQ for EC2 specifically and scan for every pricing information you can. If after that you can be 100% sure something does not incur cost, only then you are allowed to remove it from your financial model of what you want to deploy. You do have a financial model, right?

alephu5 4y ago

I got a 96 and am pleased with that. I have serious concerns about Amazon as a company, they're too big and predatory. I've been using AWS at various companies and have tried to embrace its paradigms but I hate them.