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Comment by mikeocool | Hacker News Reader

> I had them refund the bill (as in how am I going to pay it?) but to this day I've hated Amazon with a passion

They refunded you $100k with few questions asked, and you hate them for it?

I’ve made a few expensive mistakes on AWS that were entirely my fault, and AWS has always refunded me for them.

I imagine if Amazon did implement “shut every down when I exceed my budget” there’d be a bunch of horror stories like “I got DDOSed and AWS shutdown all my EC2s and destroyed the data I accidentally wrote to ephemeral storage.”

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> They refunded you $100k with few questions asked, and you hate them for it?

They exposed him to 100K of liability without any way to avoid it (other than to avoid AWS entirely), and then happened to blink, in this case, with no guarantee that it would happen again. If you don't happen to have a few hundred thousand liquid, suddenly getting a bill for 100K might well be a life-ruiningly stressful event.

Yes, he could have set up a billing alert that triggered an action to shut everything down. Easy way is to take away privileges from the IAM roles attached to the processes.

Bad design if that isn't in place for a new free-tier experiment.

This is the problem right here. I moved from AWS and specifically Beanstalk because I don't want to be some "certified AWS goblin". I just wanted to host something sensibly.

Other hosting companies don't have this problem and while I cannot complain about AWS as a service, this can be improved if there would be the will to do so. I believe there are other incentives at work here and that isn't a service to the customer.

There is no such thing as a “free tier” in AWS. At least there wasn’t until July of this year where you get a $200 credit and everything is blocked until you upgrade.

There were free services up to a certain usage limit in a month.

He hit you in the face? But girl, he apologized! Best boyfriend ever.

You don't get it! He normally isn't like that!

Given how complicated configuring AWS is, surely there could be some middle ground between stop all running services and delete every byte of data. The former is surely what the typical low spend account would desire.

In what world is that not the preferable solution? Want to know if your shit is actually robust just set your cap and ddos yourself as the first test of you architecture.

Yes, a sign of resilient architecture is to shut down when it encounters some stress.

Consider it like a crumple zone in a car.

Oops you hit a pothole now your car won't go.

Terrible analogy.

Well, shutting down is the obvious choice if you are getting DDOSed. The alternative is infinite potential debt. That's the real horror.

> horror stories like “I got DDOSed and AWS shutdown all my EC2s and destroyed the data I accidentally wrote to ephemeral storage.”

I mean, S3 also incurs ongoing charges, so if you're going to stop accruing charges you'd also be deleting your data that wasn't on ephemeral storage...

And potentially deleting all of your DNS zones (and recreating them will likely give you different nameservers so you'll need to wait for the registrar to update them once you're back)...

And...

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