Hacker News Reader

Comment by davidgatti | Hacker News Reader

Hmm not sure where the problem is. With IAM you can create a policy to limit the user to only use certain services, deploy only the cheapest type of instance type, limit the region, the time of day etc. All of this and more is built in to IAM by default. You can even create a CloudFormation as a internal product this way you can limit even more what people do, and budget for that. And on top of that you can make a Lambda that is triggered every 1h to shut down unused resources or send a warning to shut it down, if not, it will go down the next day.

The possibilities are endless. I personally don't see the IBM comparison.

View on HN

Is it reasonable to expect a brand new aws user to know how to do those things?

The same as it is not expected by anyone to know how to ride a bike or drive a car. Someone has to teach you or you have to go and take a course.

Same with any technology, you should read first all the documentation that there is, watch all the videos that AWS releases every year for free where they explain in detail every service that they have, and try to explain the best practices of it - this is all for free, or you could spend $1000 for a course, instead of risking to lose $10.000.

If you jump in to the water without knowing how to swim, and then get angry at the water because you drown - well...

After 18 years of age you become a grown up, because your parents are not responsible for you anymore. You become responsible for yourself. That is what distinguish a child from a grown up.

Of course a parent needs also to tech you responsibility and what it means.

Mine for example never did, and I had to learn life the hard way. At first I was blaming others, but then I realized that to really grow up, I need to stop blaming others and start owning my mistakes.

So, it is not expected for anyone to know everything, but it is expected that if you want to learn something new, you need to first research the topic.

You can by insure for you as a driver and for your car (and in many jurisdictions have to) — this limits your responsibility. You can spend $10000 on AWS and still make a mistake and pay another $10k+.

I don’t get the point that AWS docs are free. I mean, they are free, but the services are not. Do you pay for a visit in a car dealership?

> You can by insure for you as a driver and for your car (and in many jurisdictions have to) — this limits your responsibility

Real insurance policies have maximum coverage limits, so, while it reduces your liability by a capped amount, it doesn’t, strictly speaking, limit it; you still face unbounded potential liability beyond your insurance coverage.

what's the biggest unexpected billing of AWS fees reported? I'm thinking 100,000 seems unlikely to be reached very often.

on edit: this is not to say that I believe an insurance for this kind of thing would really work (although maybe that is because I know nothing about the insurance business) just that I don't think the problem with the insurance would be that you could always end up getting billed more than you were insured for.

> I need to stop blaming others and start owning my mistakes.

There's a big difference between owning up to your mistakes and taking on a bunch of unnecessary risk in situations where you know it's more likely you're going to make mistakes. IE: Learning, testing, etc..

In fact taking on unnecessary, possibly unlimited financial risk in a situation like that is a mistake. Want to own that one?

Are you seriously suggesting that someone who wants to use AWS should go and read all the documentation and watch all the official videos available? That would take literally years. It's huge.

It also doesn't solve the problem. If the user makes a mistake they still lose a ton of money.

It's a really interesting problem. It's getting too big and too scary for a new developer to jump in and try AWS services, which means new devs will move on to newer services with better UX. I wonder if this sort of problem is one of the few existential threats AWS could actually face. Its possible it could end up as the Oracle or Salesforce of cloud services, very successful in enterprise but definitely not a good thing to have on your resume if you want to join a startup...

I would not want to be the competing cloud service, with self-imposed limits of only what people are willing and expecting to pay, going up against Amazon (or any other cloud service of that scale) where they not only have scale already, but are being paid the extra money regularly by people screwing up in small to medium ways (even IF the most massive screwups are 'forgiven' to devs who wouldn't have been able to pay anyway, but have twitter)

I don't believe there will be any new services with better billing UX through competitive pressure. You're basically asking the competing thing to take less money in order to win, as the distinguishing factor. It doesn't make sense as a way for them to win against the larger thing taking more money.

Probably the only practical solution would be arbitrary legislation forbidding the practice, as if it was anti-usury laws. Basically taking the guise of society and saying 'you may not do this, even if people are dumb'. And then you've got a problem (at scale) of people figuring out how to do hit-n-run megabilling and walking away under the legislation, having intentionally taken what they 'mistakenly' did. An 'oops, I accidentally a bitcoin' defense.

1. yes I am, studying years to be a doctor, lawyer, Engineer etc from your point of view is also to much? Should you just start cutting people to figure out how a body works end expect for everything to be ok once you are done? The point being, yes you have to study to learn something, there is no way around it.

2. If money is a concern to you, then I should focus on learning how exactly the billing works and how to monitor correctly. This way you can build a product the right way, not to mention AWS by default has limits on their services set with limits that prevent you from doing something incorrectly. For example you can only make 5000 requests a sec on the API Gateway, you can only have 1000 concurrent lambdas, you can spin only 25 ec2 instances, ecc... (true, not all services have limits like this - but then again, if you want to use one, the first thing you should do is check the pricing page, this is what I do fro every new service that I'm planing to use).

3. AWS is not for developers, it is meant for SysAdmins and DevOps (true that some marketing materials are not clear on this), they should be the one configuring it to allow developers to host their code. If you want a turn key solution, then there are better solutions, like Heroku - incredibly easy to use and understand and have a much simpler billing structure.

With AWS you can do anything you want, AWS provides lego blocks, what do you build with it is up to your imaginations, and for sure it is not meant to be use directly by developers who have no idea how networks, computers, databases, cpu, ram, policies, storage etc works. Developers should focus on coding, and SysAdmins and DevOps should focus on managing the infrastructure.

And if you want to learn AWS because you want to be a SysAdmin, then it is true, that AWS could have a plan for beginners with even smaller default limits, and limits set on everything - this way you could more safely play with what they have. This would be a nice things to have in this case for sure.

But because they don't provide such thing, you need to be the responsible one, and start learning AWS the right way, and not get in gun blazing, and expect all will be ok. My recommendation is to learn one service at the time. If you do this, over the years the acquired knowledge will be gold. Plus the more services you learn the right way the easier it gets.

What do you think about this page: https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/?

> Select a learning path for step-by-step tutorials to get you up and running in less than an hour.

Do you think it's irresponsible for AWS to encourage beginners to try their service when they apparently only intend it to be used by those with a computer science degree and 5-year apprenticeship under an experienced sysadmin?

> What do you think about this page: https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/

It is very dangerous. If you select the full-stack tutorial you get: "Time to Complete 30 minutes". It should say: "30 min to ruin your life" ;)

If you want to really learn AWS, then this page should be used as a reference of how to design a stack. If I were you I would read the tutorials to see which services are needed for a solution, but before doing anything, I would read the docs for each of those services to really understand them, then I would go back to the tutorial and actually do it, and - MOST IMPORTANTLY - I would read the pricing page for each service that you are going to use.

> Do you think it's irresponsible for AWS to encourage beginners to try their service when they apparently only intend it to be used by those with a computer science degree and 5-year apprenticeship under an experienced sysadmin?

100% - when I started working with AWS in 2016 I had a very hard time figuring it out, because I was looking for the simplicity the the marketing team was writing about. I really don't like what the marketing team tries to tell you, because it dose not exist.

Regarding an approach to learn about AWS, I would start with all the serverless services that they have, since the pricing for most of them is ideal for beginners (WARNING - read the pricing page for each since not all have a free staring plane, like S3 and DynamoDB) and for simple weekend projects.

For example, I did build this project a while ago: https://github.com/0x4447/0x4447_product_s3_email, if you scroll down to the pricing section you will see this:

``` All resources deployed via this stack will potentially cost you money. But you'd have to do the following for this to happen:

- Invoke Lambdas over 1,000,000 times a month - Send and receive over 1000 emails a month - Perform over 10,000 Get and Put operations and over 2000 Delete operations in your S3 Bucket - Exceed 100 build minutes on CodeBuild - $1 per active CodePipeline (must run at least once a month to be considered active)

The only payment you'll encounter from Day One is an S3 storage fee for emails and CodePipeline artifacts. ```

So you can have a stack that is actually doing something very useful that costs not even a $1 a month.

It is possible to pay $0 to AWS, but you need to first understand AWS to be able to do it, another trivial example of a tiny project that is useful and cost $0 to run: https://github.com/0x4447/0x4447_product_secure301

The last point would be: don't listen to the marketing material - they are there to sell you AWS, marketing never cares about reality.

I also recommend this website https://awsvideocatalog.com - pick a service and watch all the keynotes AWS has on that service, if you'd spend 1h a day, in 6 months you'll know more about AWS then anyone else complaining here.

Agree with all of this. I think the reason you're getting so much pushback is that you started this conversation with "not sure where the problem is". Clearly you do see the problem - AWS encourages beginners to get going as quickly as possible with these tutorials and the free tier, but then makes it difficult for those users to avoid unexpected charges. They should either stop encouraging beginners, or start offering easy ways to protect yourself.

That statement was related to the sentiment that there is no way to protect yourself or a team of people from AWS pricing, people were implying that there is no tool to help you limit or track expenses, which is not true, since there are plenty of tools to do that.

Anyway, life gose on, and it was overall a good chat :)

There’s room for a little bit of the personal responsibility argument, but it’s ineffective when you take it way too far.

> studying years to be a doctor [...] Should you just start cutting people

Spoken like someone who’s never used AWS or been a doctor. Your analogy is horribly, badly flawed. Doctors do start cutting people, in the US nearly all med students dissect a cadaver at the start of their first year. What you’re suggesting is doing years of pure documentation reading, unguided by other people or a curriculum, before practicing AWS, which would be silly and a waste of time. People learn by practicing, which is why med students dissect cadavers, and which is why AWS offers a “free” platform to learn by practicing, tutorials to guide the learner, and advertising to attract learners.

> If money is a concern

Maybe this is why AWS offers a “Free Tier”? https://aws.amazon.com/free/

> AWS is not for developers

That’s not what AWS says https://aws.amazon.com/developer

> Maybe this is why AWS offers a “Free Tier”? https://aws.amazon.com/free/

People in this discussion are complaining that the free tire is misleading, plus not all services are covered. And it is true that if you turn on a bunch of server and you don't pay for a year, but forget about them, you will be charged the moment the year passes. Not to mention that you will be charged if you use the CPU of the free tire server to much - which probably very few people know about.

> That’s not what AWS says https://aws.amazon.com/developer

And my point is that the marketing of AWS is misleading, they try to convince you that if you don't know anything about computers, but you know code, you will be able to manage AWS. This is very misleading because AWS tries to make you think that AWS is a service like Heroku, simple to use, and there is just one button to push to make it all work. Completely false. I've seen countless AWS accounts that were completely misconfigured by developers who thought that AWS easy to manage. A basic example is the autoscaling of EC2. People will go to the autoscaling section of EC2 "enable it" and be superseded when it dose not work. Where the reality is that you have to do 8 other things to make it work, not to mention the work that needs to be done in the OS itself.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com