Amazon Web Services dark patterns (2024) | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Web Services dark patterns (2024)

lapcatsoftware.com

28 pointslatexr16 comments

AWS should provide features where you are prompted to set a hard budget limit when you first signup and services fail once that's exceeded, so you don't get surprised, but they don't. That should be opt-out.

(recent thread on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42133700 )

AWS does provide free trial accounts with $25 credits in some of their training environments/partners so there already are /some/ ways to do this.

(AWS does provide a opt-in budgeting feature which can alert you if budgets are exceeded. Not the same!)

While on the subject, AWS should provide an account-level setting/feature such that if there are multiple people/users/IAM logging into a single account, there is a flag so that any resources invoked in the console by a user get auto-tagged with that user's ID/IAM-identity/etc. In a small business with technical users, this would be quite helpful.

I went to give my 10 year old access to my old AWS account to play around and figured I should add some billing guardrails and was saddened to find I could anymore setup Cloudwatch/Budget billing alert guardrails to SMS my phone without paying $X a month for the SMS setup. Email is supported so I suppose I shouldn't complain and I hate SMS spammers so I get it but still another scenario of an unfriendly experience.

-- Someone using AWS the last 11 years, responsible for millions of dollars in enterprise spend on it, and sad to see their customer-centric attitude only goes so deep. I feel it getting weaker over time but there have always been limits to it.

> AWS should provide features where you are prompted to set a hard budget limit when you first signup and services fail once that's exceeded

They should, but the entire internal metering & bill generation pipeline isn't setup to support that. You can configure billing alerts but these will only refresh on updates to your estimated bill (typically re-computed every 8hrs). And since service teams are responsible for posting metering records to commerce platform their implementation may vary.

TLDR: AWS Commerce Platform is a mess.

Source: Ex-AWS SDE

How is it that they can set up a quantum computer but not up-front billing?

I'm waiting for Corey to show up and say that solving quantum spin equations is easier than AWS billing

But, in all seriousness: businesses produce products in reaction to their financial incentives, and no one(?) is quitting AWS because they don't offer billing limits

> I went to give my 10 year old access to my old AWS account to play around […]

Why not give them an old machine and a Linux install USB?

That’s how I got started around that age (ok, with a CD instead of a USB, because it was the ‘00s), and I believe those skills are much more portable/generalizable (as in: if you know basic Linux, you can probably figure out basic AWS, but I’m not sure about the reverse).

You’d also be encouraging them to learn an open system with an open philosophy and a great community, which (IMHO) is a better starting point than a closed, corporate, for-profit ecosystem.

While I agree with your sentiment, as a competing theory if one really did want to teach cloud-native things then I'll point out that AWS is not the only cloud API in town: https://docs.openstack.org/devstack/2025.1/ -> https://opendev.org/openstack/devstack#start-a-dev-cloud

My recollection is that it runs fairly well in a 8GB VM so it should positively scream on any one of the $25 32GB Dell or Thinkpad devices from Green Citizen (e.g. https://www.ebay.com/itm/316679014997 )

I haven't personally tried to set up a local network of them (to demonstrate how "AZ failure" works) but I can't imagine why it wouldn't work fine

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obligatory reference: I downloaded Slackware over 28.8k onto all 32(?) floppies. I was thrilled out of my mind about learning how this "unix" thing works that I heard so much about

Perhaps I was foolish. I appreciate your point in hindsight. Having setup websites on Linux and on S3 in past work, both years ago, I somehow thought AWS would be easier....

After dealing with trying to avoid using more expensive AWS Amplify to just have a simple static s3 website, the IAM probably took me more time to straighten out than installing linux on his laptop and setting up Apache to work through our ISP's router. Or maybe not...

For all of their faults, this is something that Azure does that I appreciate.

While I absolutely agree on the topic of hand, Aurora isn't necessarily the best example.. for what it offers it's "relatively" cheap.. and please don't mention Hetzner now, we're talking fully managed extremely reliable, redundant and multi-AZ databases

It feels like basically everything is dark patterns now. Universally hated by users, and yet it must make corps more many otherwise they probably wouldn't do it. I wish there was a way to advertise "we don't do dark patterns" in a way users could connect to all the things they hate about modern transactions.

I once tried OpenSearch serverless, as it is advertised as "you only pay for the resources consumed by the workload".

After one month of not using it I was surprised by a 300+$ bill as there is a minimum of 2 OCU billed. Yes it is explained on the billing page later in more technical terms but was still surprising for me as I have a different understanding of "only pay what was consumed".

I have had this experience as a student. I'm going through their offerings now to beef up my resume and am a little anxious about getting hands on with their free trials due to the level of knowledge I may already need to have to avoid an expensive mistake.

You'd think they'd offer a 'training' account option that gives access to every product offered but with limits low enough to be useless for any real work. Do any major cloud providers offer such a thing?

They do have training accounts, as part of Skill Builder. I honestly haven’t used that in a personal aspect. They also have tutorials that explicitly outline which resources will be enabled, which could cost money, and how to destroy them at the end.

I did this a few years ago but it took me 2 months to notice! I had to put that $200 on my ‘idiot tab’ for the year. But I feel better now knowing I was dark-patterned.

You can't use a Privacy.com card either, or you couldn't last year when I tried.

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