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Comment by ujetin | Hacker News Reader

I deleted my AWS account yesterday. It is obviously catered towards large organisations - very complicated tools and pricing that I couldn't really fit into my use case. I tried to just shut down the services that were using money but wasn't even sure I had found them all so I just closed the whole account.

I don't even like the idea of any of this stuff. I want to run my own little raspberry pi server or whatever, it seems much more fun and startupish than aws, which appears to be all of the corporate stuff I left (AIMs etc). This is funny because I remember AWS being thought of as great for "just experimenting with stuff".

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It says here that closing your account isn't enough:

> Closing your account might not automatically terminate all your active resources. You might continue to incur charges for some of your active resources even after you close your account.

https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/termi...

Is that even legal? How is it the user fault that aws can't properly track and terminate the account resources? (Altough they seem very efficient in tracking usage when the goal is to charge credit cards).

They can do it but not instantly. This is similar to any other account, if you close your checking account but someone cashes one of your checks you're on the hook, if you return your rental car but there's highway fees they'll charge you, if you order food from Seamless but requested extra guacamole in a comment they'll add it to the initial bill, ...

Likewise here if your EC2 takes a little while to stop, or if S3 is a little behind in adding up your bandwidth usage, or if the billing for any other of the myriad of AWS products is not quite real-time, I don't see why that would be illegal. Expecting that an accurate statement can be presented within a few seconds of clicking "close account" and guaranteed to be exact just because they are "online services" is a little peculiar.

I agree it's reasonable in the circumstances you mentioned(as in, being charged for the resources until they are actually terminated, even if it might take a couple of minutes/hours for them to be terminated after closing the account), but the way I read it was like it could keep unterminated services running indefinitely.

AWS is great if you have a very large infrastructure budget. Playing around on a test AWS account where thousand dollars plus or minus is no big deal is a lot of fun. Playing around while trying to keep the bill under 10$ is just torture.

AWS has a free tier that lasts for a year. I actually used it to get hands-on experience with enough services that I was able to get my AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Cloud Practitioner and Certified Developer certifications. I easily spent 60 hours creating and deleting services and it didn't cost me a cent.

I don't even know how you'd accidentally get to thousands of dollars accidentally unless you were doing something more complicated like setting up an autoscaling group.

Spin up a t3a.micro EC2 instance and run it as much as you like - it's free. If you go into it (as I did many years ago) thinking, "Let me just spin up a 16 core server with 128 GB of RAM" because that's what you'd set up in your on-prem data center then of course you're going to have a big bill.

But that's not what cloud is about. It's about resources popping in and out of existence for the minimal time and resources needed to accomplish a task.

It's quite easy to burn more money than you want to. My startup had $15k in AWS credits and the other guy in the business set fire to it in no time, running windows based EC2 instances is a sure fire way to go through a lot more money than you realise.

Egress fees is one way to get a large bill on unrestricted static-file servers

Yep, the only way to do this is using aws-nuke [0], and the billing is such a mess for small use cases.

https://github.com/rebuy-de/aws-nuke

I'm really surprised that people immediately jump to cloud providers even for personal projects when you can lease VPS and server instances for much cheaper.

A buddy of mine runs a crypto currency validator in AWS and pays over $1600 a month.

You can rent a dedicated server with 32 cores, 256GB RAM and 2TB of NVMe storage for $400 a month. Tent two in different data centers for redundancy and you'll still paying half, not to mention no surprise monthly bills due to increased traffic or creating an expensive snapshot of your DB.

how is it still profitable after 1600 cost?

I shutdown the credit card i was using. They're intentionally making it hard and I decided it was less work to update payment methods on everything else.

Good point. I probably should replace all the credit cards I have with temporary ones...

Depends on your needs, scale and experience. If the product doesn't suit you, it's worthless (or very expensive depending on perspective).

If you just want 'a server', then AWS isn't the place to go to.

To elaborate a bit more: I tend to draw the line on IaC. For example: if you're doing GitOps with Terraform and Atlantis, then go for AWS. If not, you're probably not at the point where it makes sense anyway.

love digitalocean for this

In AWS, you can create everything under a Cloudformation stack, once you delete the stack, all its resources will be deleted automatically.

The problem however is all the beginner guides including those coming from AWS team themselves teach people to create resources via console without using a Cloudformation stack.

> It is obviously catered towards large organisations

And yet it seems that only the big cloud providers offer a reasonable authentication and authorization approach.

For many other providers, api keys lend full account access (no resource limitation, no read-only/subset of actions), which is unacceptable from a security pov.

Have you tried the billing explorer? It shows a pretty detailed report of what you use.

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