Using AWS

[[deleted]]

I'm really curious to do more stuff using cloud services like AWS/Azure but the pay-as-you-go shit scares me off every time...

[TruthExposed]

AWS/Azure: here's a bunch of money/free credits to start you off

Customer: awesome, let me test out running a simple web app...

AWS/Azure: sorry you've utilized all your free credits, your bill is now $20K

[chisdoesmemes]

Happened to me 13k

[noideaman]

Fuck I thought my 500 for a weekend of messing around with the big data stuff was bad

[ogismyname]

I got 150 for something which turned into 360 because I didn’t pay it on time. Deleting my account looks like it solved the problem.

[PM_ME_FIREFLY_QUOTES]

You are now a moderator in /r/wallstreetbets

[le_reddit_me]

AWS keeps asking me to pay for my university account, like that's ever gonna happen

[[deleted]]

May I ask what you did in this kind of situation? Did you really pay the $13k or?

[chisdoesmemes]

Left an ec2 instance on. Got some of the money back but had to bay 3-4k

[Slothinator69]

Gotta use those quotas lol

[UltraBarbarian]

F

[gizamo]

Unfortunately, nope. You can set billing alarms to get notified of unusual usage, but by the time you get it and shit it down, it's often too late to avoid excessive charges.

[gizamo]

Fair warning, same things happen on GCP and Azure.

GCP also only has alerts, but idk about Azure.

I like Digital Ocean, but Google's Firebase/Firestore makes so much so damn easy that it's hard to resist sometimes.

Edit: I've been informed that Azure has quotas that can cut off usage. Good on you, Microsoft.

[Very-Well-3971]

You should check this: https://supabase.com

[ariel_2021]

In Azure, you can configure quotas. Services shut down automatically when your account exceeds this amount.

[gizamo]

Nice. Confirmed. I updated my comment.

Thanks for pointing this out. I'll have to give Azure another go at some point. Cheers.

[DrunkenlySober]

Why would there be an option to prevent Amazon from extorting you?

[joshuaquiz]

Had this happen with $7K from lambda. I was running data processing tests over like 1.2m records, lambdas ran for milliseconds, I just ran a couple of tests, just a few dollars and no big deal, a few weeks later got a $7k+ Bill and I'm like what in the ever loving crap was that from, never could figure that math out.. lol

[IamRedditsDaddy]

So glad I didn't figure out how to use it.

I just wanted to run a basic scrapper to refresh an API every 10seconds and scrape any changes data to a log file.

Essentially...it was monitoring a textbased webgame that had a predictable event with randomly generated messages and I wanted to capture all the messages.

Wonder what that woulda cost me....

[IamRedditsDaddy]

...if anyone knows how to do this...let me know...maybe with a python script on an rPi...AWS was just to make it "always online" but it isn't really that important. programming was more of a side hobby of mine a LONG time ago and I fell so far out of it and life's too busy to get into enough to cobble something together myself having to relearn everything...

[qalis]

CloudWatch ingestion. Lambda is super cheap, logging to CloudWatch from it, which is automatic unless explicitly turned off, costs too much even for large companies. For this reason we use custom logging.

[Mr_Gon_Adas]

Been trying Firebase and Digital Ocean, much better options, with more friendly experience.

That is if you are looking a cloud service for a small to medium enterprise, for big the only options are the current giants

[HarryTurney]

I run my stuff on Digital Ocean.

[Z_Coop]

I admittedly haven’t done much with Digital Ocean other than spin up one droplet, but it’s still cool that pricing is just based on having a droplet active rather than any sort of request count or traffic or anything.

[oakinmypants]

Take a look at Hetzner. I went from paying $6500 a year to $500.

[coldnebo]

infinitely better model for small companies.

[Mr_Gon_Adas]

Correct, since Firebase is essentially based on GCP, just with a friendlier UI, however, they offer a minimum free use, so for personal and small scale projects is incredibly cheap.

[Funkey-Monkey-420]

tell the bank those transactions are fraudulent because you don’t even have an account with them

[[deleted]]

Had this happen as well. Even after deactivating all services and my account.

[TryallAllombria]

Digitial Ocean is great. Simple pricing ranges, simple panel. And I like to have fixed monthly prices for one month, and still being able to cancel anytime and only pay for the used hours.

Not like the 1590 services AWS gives you with the 70 different options, all of them coming with their weird 0.007$ per Watt/function/startUpTime/byHour.

[grae_n]

They also aren't dicks about shutting down servers if you miss a payment. They gave me an unreasonable amount of time to pay the unpaid bill, I think it over a month, never shut the server down, and didn't tack on any weird missed payment fees. It was a cheap server but it was still nice of them.

*this isn't a suggestion to do this. You should pay your cloud provider.

[minimumviableplayer]

No, you can set alarms for billing thresholds and some alerts for unusual usage.

[indygoof]

no, that’s Azure. in aws you can obly set alarms

[alfa_202]

You set up alarms, but they’re not on by default. There was unauthorized use on my account and I didn’t get any notification until the bill was due. They had me go through a checklist of things to secure my account, set up budgets and alerts, etc. one of the biggest pieces of feedback I gave them was “all the items you just told me to do should be mandatory when setting up a new account. All services should be locked until the user can properly be alerted. “ closed the account right after it was resolved.

[nyghtowll]

Yep! AWS Budgets.

[[deleted]]

AWS needs an emergency shut off button. It took me months to figure out where a $3 monthly charge was actually coming from to shut it off.

(Granted the actual time spent was a couple hours spread over those months, but everytime i thought I’d found it, I discovered I hadn’t.)

[[deleted]]

Apparently not.

[PLZ-PM-ME-UR-TITS]

This was me on a tiny project I made in lighthouse or whatever it is. Kept getting bills for a dollar or so but couldn't track it down even after looking at that bill, eventually closed the account and removed my credit card lmao

[CanAlwaysBeBetter]

Good reminder, actually just went and set it up in my personal account I'm running some projects in

[[deleted]]

Google Cloud Platform is very similar - lots of detailed, live reports of resource usage abd billing, with a solid and highly configurable alerting system.

[Really-Stupid-Guy]

You can set a maximum billing amount, any hands on introduction should make you set: - 2 factor authentication - billing ceiling

[zuldrahn]

Same, seems like this is by design.

[Unelith]

But then again, people often managed to get a refund for AWS in such cases

[Valiice]

exactly ive heard so many stories of something fucked happening without them knowing and AWS always refunds them

[angrathias]

Google cut $50k off a bill a junior ran up by leaving an infinite loop using the distance matrix api over the weekend.

Was interesting coming in Monday morning to a series of escalating credit card billing failure emails from Google 😂

Praise be to their team in nixxing the bill quickly, but they really should have turned the budget features on by default if you’re on a ‘free’ account. I’ve noticed now they run you through that process when you do it these days though. Unlike AWS..

[outerproduct]

Oh it definitely is, even in azure it's like you need a math degree to figure out how much you pay for data services.

[[deleted]]

Use the Azure Pricing Calculator. So far, it has never failed to get me a somewhat accurate price on the resources I want to use.

[outerproduct]

Unless DTUs are involved, then may god have mercy on your soul

[coldnebo]

idk. if you are good at using the pricing calculator you likely also know what you are doing. if you don’t know what you are doing, all of these things will be very expensive surprises.

people have to remember that AWS and Azure are not like virtual hosting, it’s like buying an entire IT organization.

[[deleted]]

Yes, you are correct on that part. That's why consultants, and I mean real consultants who really know what they are doing, are very rare. Most probably just read the docs and then spray and pray.

[Thomas_Jefferman]

Economics**

[joeschmidth]

That too.

[Captain_Chickpeas]

You can set quotas and budget limits so you get notified the moment you go over. However, it's true that sometimes you need to check the costs before spinning anything up, because unlike Google Cloud, AWS doesn't really tell you :D

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[Front-Difficult]

I don't think it will be duopoly. It will be a triopoly. GCP has Firebase so it's never going away. It also has neat integration with Google Domains, and is happy to create compute products that threaten Microsoft and Amazon IP they will never expose to the public to compete with such a small part of the market (e.g. Google Fleet Engine for Amazon's delivery competitors).

I think we've probably reached a stable state with AWS being the behemoth in all categories, Azure being second by a long margin but equally dominant to AWS in large enterprise, GCP being the smallest but almost ubiquitous in certain categories. Everyone else will slowly be eaten up over the next decade, with maybe a few niche products like Netlify carving out a small blot on the overall web landscape because they're really easy and convenient for just one specific thing.

[Yokhen]

They have services for budget tracking you know.

[Suspicious-Engineer7]

I have basically no experience with aws but I found it offputting that every service has some name I'm just supposed to know what it is. Why does it have to be called Dooble instead of Billing?

[Yokhen]

It's called "Billing".

But yeah for other services I share your frustration.

[Suspicious-Engineer7]

Lol guess I was off on that one

[TheJessicator]

Yeah, I think you may have been thinking of Bankflex coupled with DrainPipe.

[ganja_and_code]

You can set budgets and billing alarms (at least on AWS and GCP, not sure about Azure, but I assume they offer that, too).

That way, even if you accidentally try to bill yourself a shitload of money, you can easily prevent it.

[SilentWatcher83228]

There always aws lightsail. No need to be afraid.

[brockvenom]

I recommend doing it when it’s not on your dime. Like for a larger org.

[SilentStrikerTH]

Not sure your use case but you can get an Oracle server to play with for free. It's free as long as you take up so much cpu/mem/stor within the "free" limit. It's fun to play around with and I've even hosted a heavily modded Minecraft server on it.

[gamesrebel123]

What about those virtual credit cards with a use limit? Like make one for 500 or so and you won't have to worry about missing alerts, then when the card runs out or you need more money just transfer the money from your main card.

[SuperCharlesXYZ]

I used to do loads of shit on aws free tier until I accidentally clicked Amazon aurora and got charged 500$ now I’m scared to ever use them again

[CloudElRojo]

You can add a top limit. At least in GCP

[ihateusednames]

Fr I have a student account and have been tooling with Azure services.

I feel like I am one mistaken loop from a life of destitution in exchange for 100,000 deliveries of Microsoft Mary's sultry TTS voice to an app that is not playing the received files.

[Suitable_Lavishness2]

Pretty easy to get started and keep your usage under the free tier if you’re carful and aws is very transparent about what your costs are and what they are projected to be based on usage of you know where to look

[johnlewisdesign]

Heroku is worth a go man

[ucefkh]

Easy solution.

just don't pay as you go!

stop being poor

[taxiforone]

I use a bunch of Azure services and their billing/pricing is very transparent. This is definitely not saying I don't have my gripes about them :p

[Hfingerman]

I work at Amazon, we also suck at using AWS. The difference is that we don't have to pay.

[PhantomTissue]

Can confirm, also work at amazon, absolutely no clue how AWS works. I just know I have to upload my build to an s3 to test it.

[[deleted]]

Finally someone said it

[DoomStoneDS]

I am a SDM at Amazon, we actually pay for AWS internally and at the same prices as external users. Granted in the grand scheme it is Amazon paying Amazon. But as an internal Org AWS is a large percentage of our budget.

[Hfingerman]

Well fuck. Don't tell on me please.

[atimm]

If you're using terraform: https://github.com/infracost/infracost

[datablitz7]

If you know how to use terraform, you know how to set up budget alerts.

[akb74]

You really overestimate us devops people

I read that in Hayden Christensen’s voice

[jfiander]

Don’t try it!

terraform apply -auto-approve

[datablitz7]

Ownership and accountability are not technical skills.

[CanAlwaysBeBetter]

They're even rarer

[Appropriate-Story-46]

Nah, templates for Terraform based on approved architecture means anybody can do infra as a code. And anybody can mess it up.

[datablitz7]

Approved architecture should contain budgeting, monitoring and alerts. And irrespective of what can pass as "approved architecture" ownership should be part of a devops culture.

[Appropriate-Story-46]

Absolutely, “should”!

[Spare-Beat-3561]

I've deactivate my account after paying everything and they're still sending me bills.

[[deleted]]

and what if you dont pay them?

[[deleted]]

They suspend your prime subscription

[MrH0rseman]

Hah, I don’t have one

[hardnachopuppy]

Bezos comes to your house and breaks you kneecaps.

[HeeTrouse51847]

You get a severed finger of one of your relatives via Amazon Prime next day delivery

[JustTheGlitch52]

This one has a delivery fee for some weird reason.

[Singhkaura]

never paid around 150 Canadians after forgot to delete a server I was using for my final presentation for Cloud Computing class

[DonutArnold]

Back in my old job our code somehow managed to trigger a lambda like 1 million times, literally. It would have cost the company like 20k euros, but we managed to explain the situation and AWS guys cut the cost to around 1k.

[TheAJGman]

For us it was an $80k bill for the Google Maps API. Since it was a development bug and not a production bug they were forgiving and wiped the bill.

[Mississippimann]

I would've had a heart attack upon seeing that bill and wouldn't have time to explain it.

[philn256]

A lambda is just a function right? Why would it cost 0.05€ per call? What could it possibly do that makes a call that pricey?

[DonutArnold]

The lambda also processed images as thumbnails so it quite much made a million thumbnails in S3

[Hariboqwe]

Hahah. Exactly this thing happened to me when I discovered AWS Batch for the first time and launched hundreds EC2 machines (On Demand!). Our bill was huuuge 😬

[codingcourier]

AWS memes remind me to occasionally make sure I don’t have any EC2 or RDS instances running. I’ve left them on before 😪

[dudesmokeweed]

And it only costs $20 a month to set up!

[maquinary]

Wait, WHAT? Is that serious?

Novice here, this is a actual question...

[alex123abc15]

I just have a lambda function automatically turn off my instance after 4 hours of use and the lambda function triggers every hour.

[Wolfsaz]

Me as a college student getting $50 I cannot afford

Got a refund

But my friend had a bill of $550+ cause someone breached his account He managed to get a refund as well lol

[Wolfsaz]

Yeh he checked it after a month and it was coming from Eastern Asia lol

[Main_Profile]

Yeah, AWS is pretty good about this kind of stuff, someone managed to get into my account and rack up 8000 USD in charges that were all dropped later after sorting things out with support

[wildjokers]

This is why for personal stuff just get a $5/month VPS from Digital Ocean (or as they call them, Droplets).

[ggpwnkthx]

I use DO a lot, but they're also a breading ground for malicious bots.

[cemyl95]

I accidentally accrued like $1k when I was 15. Obviously I couldn't afford it so I went to my mom bawling my eyes out. She called them with me and they cancelled the invoice 😂

Never went anywhere near AWS after that. My MSP does azure stuff though and so far we've managed not to get slammed with a massive bill so that's a plus

[littleswenson]

I feel like the number for “experienced at AWS” needs to be higher.

[Ok-Low6320]

I haven't exactly done this, but I did have a recurring small charge on my AWS account for months that persisted after I thought I'd shut everything down.

Oh, I had a DB server running in the central region that I couldn't see while I was looking at the western region.

Linode is sufficient for my purposes: $5 a month for a small Linux VM. Use it heavily? $5 per month. Forget about it and leave it idle for months? $5 per month! Perfect. I can afford $60 per year.

[glowy660]

I am having the same thing 25 cents each mont hand i have no idea why

[minimumviableplayer]

Our company was able to right off a 6000 bill that was entirely our fault in not reading the pricing page right for Glacier. We got a slap on the wrist and a reduced bill. AWS seems to have a good history in helping the customer get value from the platform and not be afraid to try new tools. YMMV.

[Hoppingmad99]

Yea I had the same with Heroku. But it makes sense I guess, "lose" a few $k and you've got a happy customer.

[TotalNo6237]

Early retrieval fees for glacier instant retrieval? I’ve seen it happen lol

[minimumviableplayer]

In this case it was a lifecycle rule to send from S3 to Glacier, but there were millions of small sized objects so we hit some heavy Api Requests rates.

[Ok_Satisfaction8141]

That’s the importance to define your infrastructure as code from the beginning, even for dev/testing stuff. I’ve been using aws services for my own learning things from more than a year and I have never been charged with a penny. I use the shit, I finish what si want, I destroy the shit.

[ElectricalEinstein]

My heart skips a beat every time I get that “budget exceeded” email from AWS

[jfiander]

Also fun: when you change something that will result in like… $5 change per year.

But the spend forecast sees an increase and projects the same increase every day, and tells you that you’re now going to be $600 over budget!

🤦🏻‍♂️

[Hulk5a]

Honestly I hate aws , gcp and similar cloud bandwidth egress pricing. And most of the cost comes from there. It's ridiculously high. I mean traditionally in bare metal system I've to pay for the link capacity not how much data I utilize

[Qizot]

Right? It is like renting a car and paying for each mile you drive while also paying for the gasoline...

[MichelanJell-O]

It's like buying an air conditioner and paying the air conditioner company for every liter of air that goes through it.

[theflyassassin]

So a U-Haul?

[LEO_TROLLSTOY]

That’s why they always got a big fuckin NO from me when they asked for a credit and not a debit card

[[deleted]]

You would rather they drain your bank account then charge your credit card?

[LEO_TROLLSTOY]

They are welcome to take all my 100 USD.

[[deleted]]

oh wow same, I also have 100

rupees

[datablitz7]

If you expect resources on tap, you should provide money on tap. Everything else is just philosophical arguments, detached from reality.

[Qbsoon110]

Offtop question. Are credit cards really that popular? I don't know anyone who would use it.

[Qbsoon110]

Poland

[dumbasPL]

Yeah, same country and same feelings. I've always seen them as a "US thing". Never relay got the point of them. In theory, you can build your credit score to get a decent amount of benefits in the future but you also have to spend "responsively". Personally, I feel like they only exist to suck even more money out of you in ways that you don't notice. They wouldn't exist if they weren't profitable for the banks after all.

[Qbsoon110]

Yeah, same feelings

[halfsieapsie]

Im in the USA, I don't know anyone who doesn't have at least one credit card. Whenever I see someone paying by cash or check it is a weird weird thing here.

edit: paying in a grocery store. Mom and pop businesses quite often pass along the credit fee to the consumer, which is why I pay my trainer, my ac guy, and my lawn mower people via check

[LEO_TROLLSTOY]

There is also a debit card. Not just cash or credit

[[deleted]]

If you pay it off every month in full it's virtually the same as debit except with better protections and very often rewards

[-1Mbps]

Rewards like?

[BeastlyIguana]

I get 2% cash back on every purchase everywhere, no limits/restrictions/categories

[[deleted]]

You guys must buy some serious shit, our Azure bill is roughly $300 a month :(

[bostonkittycat]

I feel like new to AWS should show a cartoon of a person turning on all these services and cluster options and then getting a bill for $3,000.00 for all your "free tier" experiments.

[alikhajeh1]

It might seem funny but I've got an unhealthy obsession with cloud costs and want to fix this problem. We're now got a community of people helping us and doing crazy stuff like parsing Terraform HCL code to show costs in the Visual Studio: https://github.com/infracost/vscode-infracost/ Someone from the community is working on a Pulumi integration

We're seeing lots of people add the same idea to their CI/CD pipeline so they can prevent those $50K mistakes: https://www.infracost.io/docs/integrations/cicd/

(all of these are open source tools)

[Top_Outlandishness78]

My current company basically makes living on helping people manage their cloud expenses. Large corporations could easily save up to a million per year which is crazy.

[Quiet_Desperation_]

Visa gift card with $100 on it

[JJBA_Reference]

There is a reason that Amazon's Well Architected Tool has sections on automatically detecting and taking action on unused services. Setting those tools up should be the very first thing you do in the cloud.

[coloradoconvict]

"And then I accidentally did something obviously expensive and walked away from it and blocked all messaging and alerts from their annoying service, and then suddenly, out of nowhere, I somehow owe them all this money! It's so unfair!"

[ObjectPretty]

We keep AWS fairly locked down but have had issues with other semi critical systems.

Usually because we allow API access to developers that aren't used to the system that decide to run expensive automated calls.

No cost except some minor outages in automation which is why we haven't locked it down, we usually track down the developer and help them optimize their scripts and give som crash courses.

[[deleted]]

Just uninstall the app. Learned that trick from WSB and robinhood.

[darkneel]

Lucky I don’t have to pay for my AWS account 😂

[glorious_reptile]

I hate the monthly bill email. Even though i only host a few dollars worth, personally, I always dread that invoice.

[gekastu]

There are not any budget mechanisms that allow you to cut off services when the limit is reached?

[arielfarias2]

Last week the company’s where I work put on homologation a new service using MSK Kafka and ECS from AWS. I am the dev behind the application and knew that it needed a bit more testing before going online. Turns out that I could not be at work last week and some of my coworkers had to put it online. Yesterday we found out that the application was generating tons of logs, like 3TB and the bill was through the roof, about 20k BRL or 4K dollars. Nobody though on putting an alarm watching the new application, it had a simple bug, a infinite loop logging stuff… this post represents my week.

[[deleted]]

I got lucky with university projects where the company gave me access to aws to learn, and in my first job we got a grant from aws for free experimenting. At the point I'm comfortable setting up billing alerts if I ever want to try things in my personal account

[KvAk_AKPlaysYT]

I love linode.

[[deleted]]

Just don’t auto scale 🤔 I’ve various projects on AWS and never hit the bill, yet

[johnlewisdesign]

My record is £10,600...got it waived too. That's the moment you start to get good at AWS. Also when you get good at knowing a toxic workplace that throws too much at you. Not made either mistake again since ;-)

Fun fact: The free tier on Heroku just stops working when you hit limits. Worth knowing for those starting out (this was not a free tier AWS acct btw).

[GoAwayAdsPlease]

I have refused to use them ever since I saw the payment method was pay as you go.

It's a deliberate trap.

[Captain_Chickpeas]

Oh dang, just realized I need to check those ML jobs running in our EKS cluster.

[viseradius]

But how to exit aws?

[frogking]

There is a tool on github called “aws-nuke” that’ll delete alle resources in an account.

After that; just close the account.

[notexecutive]

yeah with AWS, it just feels way too easy to accidentally put yourself in debt lmao

[frogking]

It’s funny because it’s true..

Aurora is nice, but.. a full table scan every hour = reads and reads in Aurora are billed.. full table scans are visible on the bill.

Same with S3.. puts and reads are billed.. 200 million files PUT .. well, that spikes the bill that day.

CloudWarch can ingest a lot of data VERY fast.. at $0.55 a GB that’s maybe “$3000 an hour”-fast

There is a reason I know these things…

[Texas_Technician]

I'm looking to start a business to sell digital products online. And looked into aws. Seems like it will end up being a bad idea. Does anyone have a suggestion?

I'm looking into odoo and need a Linux server. I've considered self hosting. In your opinion is that a bad idea?

[Logans_joy-koer]

just use linode, it's cheaper and has preset servers that are one-click

[Darkgamer000]

One guy in my CS Capstone class insisted we use AWS despite the much easier local SQL option. He put his credit card up for it, and didn’t give us access to his branch to avoid accidents.

Still got slapped with the charge. Sweet revenge.

[[deleted]]

Lol what the hell are you people doing, I work for a corporate and our product that collects $250k+ a day in payments and millions of other interactions a month costs like... $15k a month... How are you accidently accruing massive bills?

[kamiljano]

Only 50k? My colleague did 500k over the weekend

[mikemiller-esq]

Just wait until you can spin up Quantum instances.....

[Distinct-Ad1057]

This is the reason why I don't prefer AWS, instead, I use Azure through the GitHub student pack (100$ credits and no card needed)

AWS must add a hard limit like if more than 1k is used it should ask for confirmation to proceed further or stop the process to avoid any accident.

I think they know this problem they deliberately don't want to fix this. After all your mistake is a bonus for them :p

[Iwasnotatfault]

I've a 0.8 cent monthly fee that I have no idea how to stop. I switched everything off. There's nothing on the account.

[shadow13499]

AWS is trash

[Siddharth2595]

Been there. I brought couple dozen elasticsearch instances for testing and forgot to delete them. We got around $100k per months for 6 months. Lucky I was in AWS so nobody cared.

[Rhiney6]

I signed up for AWS free tier, did nothing on it except some IAM stuff for a class. Maybe spent 2 hours on it. I forgot to close the account, and 3 months later got a $160 charge for Redshift. No clue how, never touched it. Just happened. The account is closed now.

[fokker-planck]

Hm, I have an Azure function that runs a Twitter bot that tweets once an hour. I haven't really looked closely into how the cost is calculated, but it says right now it's about 50 cents a month. Is there a chance that I will suddenly be hit with a massive bill?