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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 t

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.

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.