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Comment by msh | Hacker News Reader

Amazon is irresponsible when they let people sign up for a unlimited credit.

At minimum they should provide hard billing caps.

putting stuff on the internet is dangerous. if you're not prepared to secure public endpoints stop creating them.

Putting stuff on the internet is dangerous, but the absence of hard caps is a choice and it just looks like another massive tech company optimizing for their own benefit. Another example of this is smartphone games for children, it's easier for a child to spend $2,000 then it is for a parent to enforce a $20/month spending limit.

Are you really comparing a software developer provisioning an online service to a child buying tokens for loot boxes?

More the "dark pattern" of empowering unlimited spending and then what keeps on unfolding from it.

No it isn't. There are many ways to put stuff on internet with guaranteed max costs.

blaming the victim? stay classy.

intentionally allowing huge billing by default is scummy, period.

Yes, you as a developer should know something about how the service works before you use it. I first opened the AWS console in 2016 and by then I had read about the possible gotchas.

Well, people get informed by reading these stories. So let's keep informing people to avoid AWS.

Yes I’m sure large corporations and even startups are going to leave AWS because a few junior devs didn’t do their research.

You do know that large corporations and startups employ junior devs as well, right?

All else being equal, would you rather choose the platform where a junior dev can accidentally incur a $1M bill (which would already bankrupt early startups), or the platform where that same junior dev get a "usage limits exceeded - click here to upgrade" email?

Well, first I wouldn’t give a junior dev with no experience admin rights to an AWS account and would I have tight guardrails around what they can do - like I’ve done now with over a dozen implementations for clients since I’ve been in consulting for five years and the four years before that as an architect for product companies.

I also wouldn’t give a junior dev access to production databases.

Also from working with AWS from both the inside (Professional Services) and the outside at a third party consulting companies, I know how aggressively AWS is about keeping startups and they would never risk losing the continuing revenue of a company like that.

> All else being equal, would you rather choose the platform where a junior dev can accidentally incur a $1M bill

If a junior dev has the access to do that, then there is a big failure (probably more than one) by someone who isn't a junior dev after choosing AWS that was necessary to enable that.

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