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Comment by afarrell | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how much of that is people forgetting to shut down unused EC2 instances

It really feels like they design the thing to make that happen.

I got stung for over $100 just as a casual user, because I never guessed that I had to click through all the (slow loading) regions to see the instances and volumes and snapshots I might have burning money.

The web interface is a total clusterfuck.

Also their documentation. I frankly find it a personal achievement to hear of people successfully navigating their documentation to a working solution.

Just like you, I got burned for about a hundred dollars whenever they switched their UI for EC2 to only show instances per region. I have no idea when that change happened, but they weren't loud enough announcing it.

While they're desperately lacking in good getting started documentation, the reference docs are some of the best in the industry. I'll grant they're not pretty, but they cover everything in detail.

That was a concern of mine until I created alerts. Now I get emailed if X goes over a threshold, and the instance can be shutdown after another threshold.

Agreed - there's an opening for a great desktop software solution to manage all AWS services. Kind of like CloudBerry Explorer but for more than S3.

There is one, it's called elastic wolf

Awesome, I will give that a try.

thank you, looks an amazing tool - I tried it and has almost all the function

I got stung with it too, but was refunded...

Amazon are exceptionally generous with refunds, both with AWS and retail.

Whenever I've had a similar issue, I've emailed to explain and been given a full refund.

Me too. Happened 2 times to me already. ;-)

What I do is set up billing alerts through CloudWatch. I have $25/month in personal AWS usage paid for by my company (to encourage people to learn) and I set an alert when my monthly usage has hit $20 (which just went off yesterday).

The billing and cost management page should show you which regions you are incurring costs from on an ongoing basis.

But yeah, you have to know about all of this to use it. They should probably set a default alert at about $25/month on every new account, then let you change or delete it if you want.

Billing alerts and learning to use the CLI largely remove the issue of ghost resource usage. If you use AWS beyond the basics, it is worth investing the time to get the CLI setup and use it in favor of the web interface.

It makes sense to me that a GUI for managing servers intended to bare a production load would make it hard to shut those servers off.

Yeah, because that's a logical reason they make billions and not because large companies like Netflix (not to mention pretty much every tech startup these days) use them so heavily.

Or maybe, just maybe, he was joking.

Perhaps. Since it's impossible to tell, however, the safest assumption is that he wasn't.

I think you'd remember when you get the bill.

Except you don't get a bill, you get a receipt that gets buried in tons of junk mail.

And as I reply to this, I decided to check my AWS console, because there is an instance for the life of me I can't terminate.

Have you tried changing regions in the console?

Agreed on this advice. When I was new to AWS I kept receiving a bill for a few cents that obviously wasn't worth my time to resolve, but still really irritated my why I couldn't find a running instance. Turns out the running instance was in a different region and I didn't know the EC2 server list displayed only one region at a time.

If you have the aws cli tool installed this will list all of your instances and their public IP addresses in all regions for you:

    for region in `aws ec2 describe-regions | awk '{print $NF}'`; do echo $region; aws ec2 describe-instances --region $region --query 'Reservations[].Instances[].[[Tags[?Key==`Name`]| [0].Value], PublicIpAddress]'; echo ; done

This is the exact reason why I refuse to give amazon a non-prepaid visa card.

Where I live, every grocery store sells them without requiring ID.

Are you trying to protect your identity or just make sure the bill doesn't go over a set amount? If the latter then it shouldn't matter if ID is required.

I guess not needing an id just makes it easier. It's always a pain having to provide two forms of proof of address

There's a lot of people to control instances who never see a bill. That's a different department :D

This is the #1 benefit of B2B vs B2C. It's someone else's money.

See: the entire rental car industry.

Guilty here. It was a ~$500 lesson learned.

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