HN Reader

- Choose the lowest cost resource (it's a tutorial!)

- Cleanup resources when the `delete` subscript is run

I don't think it's fair to expect developers to do paranoid sweeps of their entire AWS account looking for rogue resources after running something like this.

If a startup had this behavior would you shrug and say "this happens, you just have to be paranoid"? Why is AWS held to a different standard by some?

One of the problems highlighted was that the documented teardown procedure did not properly delete the OpenSearch domain. Would AWS Nuke (https://github.com/ekristen/aws-nuke) correctly destroy everything that the tutorial sets up?

I am just amazed that people are able to navigate the services and configure them properly.

> It’s so difficult to be paranoid about every single technology you use.

I would be paranoid with anything related to AWS, I don't want to risk my bankruptcy (or near bankruptcy experience) on small mistakes or the goodwill of the AWS support.

I'd recommend either learning the basic building blocks (these skills also transfers well to other clouds and self hosting) or using a higher level service provider than AWS (Vercel etc) - they do it better than AWS.

Also in my opinion billing is the new perf test but post factum and obscure, i.e. it is super easy to miss some key points in the development and then wake up with the costs falling down the responsibility sink (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41891694)

It's better business to have people beg for mercy and then magnanimously waive fee than to have any discussion about actual hard limits (which would be used by big corps too not just students).

Yes it can be done technically - Azure already has a not loudly advertised account type that is hardcapped. And no billing alerts aren't a solution. Hell you could even do opt-in "yes I understand my data will be deleted" hardcaps.

This is a fixable problem - they just don't want to because a fix would be bad for earnings.

That was 18(!) years ago. It's still nowhere to be found.

There's like 17 ways to do analysis, some of them paid, but none address the actual problem of capping a bill. It's pure malice.

Building a business on blank cheques and accidental spends is shady. It's also a large barrier to adoption. The more times devs see reports like, "I tried [random 20-minute tutorial] and woke up to a bill for my life's savings and luckily support waived the fee this one time but next time they're coming for my house", the less they'll want to explore your offerings.

I just don't get it.

The story of "it's easier" is fake.

The story of "you won't need highly paid technical experts to maintain things" is fake.

The story of "it's cheaper" is fake.

The story of "you can't run your own computers it's too complex for ordinary companies to work out" is fake.

Its all fake and people still are diving headlong into the clouds, falling through and hitting the earth hard.

There's enough discussion in the community about the risks and hazards of major clouds - you only have yourself to blame when that huge bill hits because you did some thing that would have not cost an extra cent on self hosted systems or virtual servers.

Go learn Linux. Go buy virtual servers from IONOS where they charge zero for traffic.

I was able to get the charges reversed, but definitely learned not to trust their guides.

A good rule when working with any sort of cloud service: Everything that can be charged for, will be.

There are plenty of stories of people getting charged massively, and one may wonder whether this has any negative effects on them getting new customers. Unfortunately it's usually not the ones working with it who are the ones making the decision to use AWS or other cloud services, and the ones who are have their minds fully clouded by the propaganda --- I mean marketing.

--> https://files.rombouts.email/IMG_0092.jpeg

I do not know what others feel but with this kind of frictionless setup, plus low intuitivity in the UX/UI of those services, people are not concerned about setting up a credit card, and billing bundling between services (e.g. AWS batch + Lambda + EC2) is part of the business model.

I do not know how to articulate it, but it's more or less like those modern amusement parks where you pay to enter the facility, and for every attraction and even the toilet you pay to go.

billing surprises is among the top 5 reasons I keep a homelab for experimenting. if your project can't be deployed to non-cloud infra, I likely won't be using it in the future.

There's a reason there are very well paid positions in companies to guide colleagues on how to use AWS cost-effectively and with lower risk.

That said: fuck, that's expensive and poorly explained! Not doing anything cloud without hard limits!

On the one hand I get that if your business depends on such a service you don't want it to suddenly go down. But on the other hand there is almost never a hard mechanism to limit your risk. Or if there is, it is opt-in. The conspiracist in me says this is working exactly as planned for AWS as they have no financial incentive to limit customer risk.

How about postgres with postgis? https://postgis.net/docs/using_postgis_query.html

needed to send "raw" http requests instead of using their bloated sdk for reasons, and requests failed with "content-type: application/json" header, but succeeded with "content-type: application/x-amz-json-1.0". get out of here with that nonsense.

I think its all hiding the fact that people don't want to take the time to design (and maintain) scalable infrastructure and instead rely on fake abstractions that pretend to be infinite, always-available, magic, or w/e. I'm sure there is some open source software that helps here.

Best run company in the world /s

I ran it for 1 minute expecting to be paying the $5 or whatever it was per minute and was charged around $100 for it to "boot up". Cancelled it. Never trusted amazon billing again = (

Bezos keeps waxing lyrical in all his interviews on how he "tests" his company services by calling them on the phone to make sure the SLAs or whatever are accurate. But they aren't. TBH I was kind of confused how proud he was that it took 10 mins to get through to someone on the phone instead of 1 minute or something, on how they noticed it and had to "rearrange" things. Like wtf, I would have fired ALL of my executive below me if such an egregious false advertising existed. It can't be that bloody hard as one of the richest people on the planet to just pay some dude $5 an hour to make sure services are billed as expected, run as expected.

I am sorry to complain, I know they have all done great jobs, but it makes me wonder whether I would be "out of touch" if I was ever in a C-suite role. From what I see around me, I definately would be. But maybe those margins don't matter?

I honestly am confused after decades in IT why management is never held responsible. If I ran a company mgmt would be the FIRST to be fired if there were any issues. I swear I read a comment on HN once from a manager saying why should they be held responsible if there is a fuck up lower down the chain, I was like wtf, the whole point of being a manager is to be RESPONSIBLE. Management isnt a luxury "earn the big bucks" because Im better than everyone else, and thus should be protected.

The easiest way to diagnose this as a CEO is to see how often MGMT have been let go at different tiers, and if there havent been any, well there must be a form of corruption / nepotism occuring.

Been burnt as a "small" entrepeneur by all of the greats, Google ( shutting down my instance when it went viral because I decided to upgrade the hosting which for some unknown reason mean it had to be shutdown WITHOUT warning for 24 hours, possibly to transfer it or something god knows. AWS etc.

I know it might seem like a small gripe, but as a millionaire now I remember how I was treated by these companies.

Maybe I should just be grateful I could use them at all.

I think I'm just saying its crazy how the "low" b2b customer is treated when it would be so cheap to just make sure these collosal fuck ups don't happen.

It's always been. They are always pushing boundaries and checking what they can get away with. The response "we’ve processed a billing adjustment for the unexpected charges as a one time courtesy." even though it looks like a bug and it hasn't been fixed since is already telling.

After about two days of struggling and a $100 bill, I said fuck it, deleted my account and deployed to DigitalOcean’s app platform instead, where it also failed to deploy (the error was with my app), but I had logs, every time. I fixed it in and had it running in under ten minutes, total bill was a few cents.

I swore that day that I would never again use AWS for anything when given a choice, and would never recommend it.

Instead they have some pencil pushers calculating that they can milk thousands here and there from "user mistakes" that can't be easily disputed, if at all. I'm sure I'm not the only person who's been deterred from their environment due to the rational fear of waking up to massive charges.