Every time I look at the AWS prices page or at its control panel, I feel like I need to get a special advanced degree to understand a thing.
I clearly did something wrong, but the process was so confusing that I couldn't tell you what it was. It probably had to do with running the server at sub-optimal times when rates were higher, but I don't remember reading anything about that. It was a Windows-based game server, so the extra cpu overhead might have had something to do with it.
Considering the huge amount of developers having problems of this kind how hard would it be for AWS to implement a similar system?
Doesn't cost anything, can use different bank accounts for funding on a per card basis, configurable limits.
This is a royal pain in the ass for those of us with hundreds of cards registered through them.
If there was another service of this type that existed, I’d switch to them in a heartbeat. And I will no longer recommend them here.
2: New accounts since around October are already on the new thing.
I don't want to be that guy who yells out from my armchair to say something is easy. But........ quota management at its core is incrementing a number, then reading the number back. AWS is already doing things plenty more complicated than that. I'm sure they could build this if they cared to.
You have to configure (correctly) an AWS IAM account with permissions to run actions you have to specify when budget amounts are hit. There's no simple 'Do not spend more than $X per month' setting. You have to understand AWS's auth and roles to set a limit using an action.
At best you might get some alerts in a timely manner. Good luck.
I had a similar experience as you. You are getting lured in by the free tier, but then this paid additional service is needed and that paid on top. Didn't work for me at all.
Sadly, they don’t turn these things on by default. You have to know about them in advance, and you have to know how to configure them. That’s one thing I wish they would improve.
It is, however, far cheaper and has more transparent pricing.
It's called administrating on whisky ;)
Why does it have that? Because Azure gives away $150/ month Azure credits to students with Visual Studio. If Azure "mistakenly" lets a student spend $5000 it doesn't get to bill their credit card or chase them with debt collectors, those student accounts don't have any money, don't have a credit card, may have no bank account, so long as some institution paid for Visual Studio licenses there may not even be a real human being behind them. So, the only option for Microsoft is to have a water-tight shut off once you spend $150. Added 1TB of SSD to a virtual machine when you meant 1GB? That's gonna burn your $150 real fast. Accidentally picked the turbo-fast Azure SQL instance instead of the toy one you actually needed to demo Power BI? Ditto. But you don't get an enormous bill and then hope they let you off, the credit runs out and everything goes dark instead.
Amazon seems to believe that so few people care about this they don't need to compete. Maybe they're even right. But I, for one, don't want to risk my life savings every time I'm on a screen where a fat-finger costs $5000 per hour, so Azure looks pretty attractive.
But I'm not sure what the tradeoff is. They have a lot of services with a lot of options. The pricing is designed to meet everyone's needs.
More broadly, there's a whole cottage industry of businesses that exist only because the UI for the major cloud providers is terrible. Stuff like security auditing or even telling exactly WTF is going on (let alone over time) is so painful that it's worth paying someone else to provide a better UI. Same for billing.
That's a surprisingly charitable interpretation.
From that perspective, I think it might be ok to say that most eng folk complaining about AWS billing need a safer language (higher level abstraction) where they are protected from causing harm or being harmed.
You can basically do max bill now -- you can set up a cloud watch alarm for billing and when it reaches a certain price, run a script. Your script could just shut everything down and delete everything, or do whatever is appropriate for your account. That's their solution to this.
Also they don't have instant feedback on usage -> cost. They batch process it. So if you get a huge spike in usage, AWS may not even know that for a while. They could in theory be willing to eat the cost of usage between it happening and their processing, but are probably unwilling.
Because of the potential overhang before the billing system catches up I think it would be appropriate to lower the service quotas on this type of account. I'm not sure if the customer can lower their own quotas which would be an alternate cost control strategy but a beginner wouldn't know to think of that anyway. The solution with billing alerts is good at a company level but too much for a beginner in my opinion.
I know unexpected costs were a concern for me when I started using AWS as a student in 2008 and it is still a concern for people in the same situation, just with so much more complexity on top of it all. It will be a tiny fragment of their revenue but as time goes on a higher and higher level of expertise is required to get started, even though you can accomplish a lot with just the free tier. The amount of progress they've made on this issue in the last 13 years is just not impressive.
They lock your account but keep all the resource active and the bill just keeps going up until you pay to get back in.
It's pretty easy stuff, IMO, but the upside for them is low -- after all they are already #1.
If you don't have your data backed up in something other than Amazon, Amazon is the LEAST of your worries.
As long as Jeff gets richer.
> "selling AWS at a loss" is crisp shorthand for a lot of startups' business models!
Now that I know this complexity, I can't unlearn it. But for everyone else, I would just recommend Digital Ocean, Scaleway or Hetzner.
Everybody knows it's complex to their advantage, they are not stupid - but they can always defend themselves using the flexibility card. I don't believe a class action would ever happen.
[0] https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/mac-mini-m1
Even if I hit the "General Purpose" link on the page I land on, I STILL don't land on a page with $ signs on it.
Seriously, I don't even know where they list the damn pricing anymore.
It used to be listed out plain and simple on the first page you landed on with a region selector.