Ask HN: What does a newbie need to know in order to avoid AWS cost disasters? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What does a newbie need to know in order to avoid AWS cost disasters?

16 pointsel_hacker13 comments

I am about to use some AWS services for the first time and I am a bit worried about the disasters that happen because of the pay-for-what-you-use business modal, a simple loop can cause you a 5 figure bill.

So I am asking about the necessary things I should know as a beginner AWS user to avoid such problems.

Also, any other info/advice to reduce costs is welcome.

The services I will be using are S3, Elemental MediaConvert, and CloudFront.

For video streaming.

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To mention just the first few that come to mind:

- Setup aws billing cost alerts based on thresholds

- Consult AWS billing dashboard daily first, then weekly, then monthly. There is a "forecast" that can tell where you're going to land at the end of the month (ballpark).

- Understand how s3 charges, take advantage of the various storage classes. Setup s3 bucket lifecycle to delete objects if you have expiring objects.

- Make sure you setup backups. This can be a source-code repo or something like glacier. Make sure you understand how it works. tl;dr archiving is cheap, retrieving is expensive & slow.

- Make sure you understand how data transfer is charged on AWS (e.g. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/overview-of-data-t... - there are many others)

- Avoid services that use the AWS API to fetch metrics unless you have bandwidth to monitor closely. I've seen companies getting charged 6-7k/month for months, without anyone noticing, just because a prom exporter was abusing the API. When I took notice, three months in, I removed the exporter without letting anyone know. Scream-test was passed in flying colours, no one complained :-)

Good luck! :D

Ive always wanted a AWS Billing Alert with a button like "Stop Everything" - that stops all my processes in case Ive made a mistake.

I also wish AWS offered more protection at say cdk or cloudformation level. A sort of "are you sure you want to do this" on capturing some event

I haven't worked with CDK. I would avoid cloudformation like the plague, aws support for terraform is really good. There were a few "gotchas" regarding RDS, ElastiCache and some other-resources that do counter-intuitive things, but there were workarounds in the past, my guess is that the situation has been improved or at worse... Well use the old workarounds.

Just curious... are you using it for a personal project or is it part of a requirement for a role/employment?

I've seen this happen: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/w4eo12/usi...

I don't have any great pointers unfortunately, though I met someone not too long ago who has a product to help with monitoring AWS costs: https://www.cloudforecast.io/

Disclaimer: I've never used this tool as I don't use AWS but if I did have to use AWS, I would likely try something like this at least early in the game to avoid getting rekd.

Yoooo. Appreciate the shout-out! I am one of the co-founders and CEO of https://www.cloudforecast.io/

We're a (mostly)bootstrap company, so it's always awesome to hear the "word of mouth" mention of my company. It means we're doing something right :).

Feel free to let me know if I can help in any way or answer any questions anyone might have!

Appreciate you reaching out! I will definitely be in touch if I start exploring the AWS landscape a bit more.

If there’s any common pitfalls you’ve seen your customers run into and can share with OP, I’m sure (s)he would be grateful! :)

In my view this makes it very difficult to use AWS or Azure for fun or as part of a small operation. It's fine when you have a big organization monitoring this stuff and a support team, but how will you feel if you get a billing alert at 3am when you're asleep or out at a nightclub telling you there is a massive overspend. Are you going to put yourself on 24hr support?

I'm just moving from somewhere with AWS and a large team supporting it onto Azure with a much smaller team where I'll have full access to creating any component and the billing information, will be interesting to see what happens. Even then though it's not really publicly accessible so we shouldn't get anything too unexpected.

Can’t you set spending limits on AWS which should solve this? What other services have better functionality to avoid blowing up spend?

I don't think you can set hard limits, only alerts. In my view there should be a plan designed like this, but I don't think they care about small time users enough to introduce it. I think the big 3 services are all the same in that regard.

AWS has tools to set spending thresholds and to alert when you go over. Set those up first thing. Regularly (daily) check your usage in the dashboard and stop things before they get out of hand.

You will eventually accidentally spend more than you want to. This is a feature. Just try to catch it early and course correct before annoying becomes disaster.

get a virtual debit card, put a limit on it, this goes for any online service that is pay as you go or free trial

Do you know which one(s) are accepted by cloud vendors?

AWS will accept pretty much anything

azure and GCP can be very annoying though

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