Then they need to start a team dedicated to finding a good way to let customers halt spending at a given limit with minimal impact on their operations.
They already win on UX (okay, okay, it's an opinion ffs), but unlimited liability makes a lot of people very uncomfortable. Those two actions would go a long ways towards demonstrating good faith in that area.
If it would cost too much, maybe they could present it as an easy way to cut expenses at the same time that they introduce a small price increase. This is a common and long-standing complaint/feature request.
As someone that has tried and failed to get some small personal sites running on AWS a couple times, I'm going to have to tag this snippet with [citation needed].
I compared[1] it to a bartender who walks you through an entire sale and only at the last second rejects your purchase for being underage (instead of denying you the at the initial request for something alcoholic).
Of course, that’s one of the minor things in the grand scheme.
[1] http://blog.tyrannyofthemouse.com/2016/02/some-of-my-geeky-t...
Funnily enough, I've never ever been able to understand what Heroku is, or how to deploy anything useful on it :) But I'm old, and I've always found it easier to tinker with nginx configs.
Tinkering with nginx is good, but what if you want to add a database, a cache, a logging service? What if you want to automatically build code when you push to github? What if you want to easy clone multiple environments (for staging, prod etc) without never doing an SSH into server? What if you want to have versioned releases that you can easily rollback to a specified version or push a branch into one environment and another branch into another environment? And you get a workable subdomain for every environment you build with SSL enabled. All of that can be scaled down and up with literally few clicks.
I... just add it. How do I add it in heroku where everything is "just create an app and push it" and everything is separate "dynos" (whatever that is), each with different pricing, storage, bandwidth etc.
Thing is: if we're looking for free, that may make sense. you still need tinkering though: you need to figure out what the whole dyno thing is about and how to connect from one dyno to another, and so on.
However, if we expand this a tiny bit to cheap and/or free, then simply running the lowest-tier server at Digital Ocean will be a better proposition. And installing a database these days is basically the same thing: run a command to install, all you need is to connect to it. No tinkering. And it will still probably scale significantly better than a free tier at Heroku :)
Once again, I'm biased and old, and can afford to spend money on side projects. I know that sometimes even $15 a month is out of reach (oh, I've been there). But yeah, this sorta prevents me from ever understanding Heroku :)
I also remember trying to set up SFTP whenever it was first released. It was literally impossible to do what they were advertising (S3-backed SFTP with jailed homes for each user) without writing a manual json config (I never got it to work). I had built my own solution for this exact thing on EC2, using a bash script more or less, and thought the hosted option would be less of a maintenance burden. Needless to say I quickly gave up.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/transfer/latest/userguide/scope-...
The more annoying part is that the service only supports public/private key logins. If you want user/pass you have to write a lambda. The lambda is pretty simple though, it checks the credentials (so it can hit any backend you like), and if they pass it returns a 200 with a json doc of role (which is just sftp assume role), policy (the scope down from above), and home dir.
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/storage/enable-password-authent...
This touches on a larger issue with AWS though. It's that they are trending to leave out functionality and point to lambda as the solution. On one hand, I get it. The lambda solution is infinitely more flexible, but what if I just wanted an sftp for a couple users that uses user/pass?
To your final point, it is so much less maintenance. There is no server to manage, and since I want all the data in s3 anyway, it's already there. This solution replaced a server with chroots, EBS, scripts to move data to s3, etc...
I know it’s rhetorical and a lesson learned myself, but yeah… I would expect folks to learn to use this tool to help manage costs this way.
I'm not doubting that the situations you describe are true, but abandoning resources like that is an AWS-lifecycle problem, not really a Terraform one.
Why you can’t look at the load balancer, look at the listener and then show what’s in the target groups is beyond me.
CDK is another tool that build on the cli and boto3 concepts, and also manages the orchestration and dependencies.
Having to go back to the console isn't a fault of CDK. Learning the right tool to use for a situation is part of the learning curve. I go back to the console all the time to look something up quick or to understand what config options are available. Or I repeat the same steps in the console enough times that I get bored with it and automate
Edit: also I tried and have given up on CloudFormation more than once. CDK is like a wrapper layer around it, and has been pleasant to use.
I’ve used all three major clouds in production now and I dread using the AWS console. Or really any part of it, over Azure or GCP.
I’ve always thought of them as purely winning the “nobody got fired for…” mindshare thing despite having a thoroughly mediocre product.
I'm pretty sure something along the lines of this^ was posted on HN by a former AWS employee but I can't find it now.
Their UI toolkit for that at least is on point.
AWS is awesome when you have a large number of resources, that are created programmatically and reproducibly, with redundancy and duplicate environments.
The budgeting tools are really amazing at letting you categorize your costs and create appropriate alerts. The permissions system lets you define very specific roles.
Its complex. But if your system is complex, it gives you the tools to keep track of it all. If you have a <=$5000/month budget, it is probably too small to make sense in AWS. You can probably run your system on a couple servers.
I have a handful of AWS Lambda functions with a DynamoDB backend serving hundreds of clients, my bill for the month of April was $0.01.
No, a VM wouldn't cut it.
But you are right that there are certain slots where AWS doesn't make sense: There's one in the lower middle range where you can save a bunch of money by using a VM or two with your own DB servers. And there's the one where you're so big it might actually be worth it to implement the whole stack yourself.
What kind of thing do they serve? Somewhere I could read more about this kind of project?
Basically it takes different inputs and commands and uses different APIs to fetch data based on the input efficiently without the need for web scraping. DynamoDB is used mostly as a cache for common queries so I don't go over API quotas.
Most of the bots are made by me, but with AWS API Gateway I can easily generate API keys for anyone else and keep track of their usage.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/apigateway/latest/developerguide...
No. I looked into AWS vs Azure vs Cloudflare vs Digital Ocean for something I'd like to build this year and (for my thing) Cloudflare (Workers) was the best balance of cost, scalability, and maintainability.
> I don't understand why so many people want to use AWS for such small budgets.
Serverless (I hate the term) makes a lot of sense for small budgets and projects. You're investing very little, so the downside of (severe) vendor lock-in is somewhat low. The upside is HA infrastructure, horizontal scalability, zero maintenance, ignorable monitoring (at least initially), consumption based costs, etc..
The biggest problem with all of them, except Digital Ocean, is that it's difficult to "own" your data in the sense that you can download a copy of a DB and keep using it somewhere else. IIRC Digital Ocean has a fairly nice managed PostgreSQL offering, but it still scales similar to a traditional DB (ie: not automatically).
The next biggest problem with AWS and Azure is that you can't figure out what anything costs, at least not easily. For example, I know for a page I'd want to serve via Cloudflare Workers, I could do 1 hit = 1 point read from Azure CosmosDB, but I couldn't figure out if the pricing includes egress. Just look at the pricing page for CosmosDB [1]. It's ridiculously complicated and that's one service on Azure.
1. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/cosmos-db/...
A lot of hackathons, workshops and courses ask you to use AWS these days. Whether it's to run machine learning instances, win a sponsor prize or learn how to use Lambda, students are often encouraged to learn one of the major cloud providers.
Also it's a resume boost. It's another buzzword you can add to your resume.
This is exactly what we do with Vantage: http://vantage.sh/
We give point-in-time run-rates of all active resources based off of the region and resource/service configuration.
In addition we try to simplify people's understanding of where their costs are coming from. If anyone needs help with this, they can personally reach out to me at [email protected]
Starting with obnoxious API changes, followed by ToS changes. Hopefully that's as far as it has to go.
It's like hiring a plane to fly over your house repeatedly to tell you whether or not it's on fire. There has to be a better way.
Maybe there are discounts or other processing that makes this hard.
Or, less charitably, this would lead to people optimising their costs a lot better and canceling unused services much sooner.
AWS billing IS complicated but could be made so much simpler...
Because, if you are a company that uses AWS at scale (deploying literally thousands of resources at a time), you care more about meeting demand and getting resources to spec, than you do about the cost of an individual elastic IP...
The price of each individual resource isn't something that you want to see on every screen you touch. It literally clutters the console with information that you couldn't give a shit about when your company is making millions (or billions) on the services you provide. You care more about your service's reliability/scalability/uptime/etc than anything else. This is priority numero uno.
If and when cost analysis becomes priority, you look to see where you may be overprovisioning resources - hence, the billing console.
But for the larger players on AWS (the multi-billion dollar ones that AWS cares more about making happy than you or I), an extra $100k in AWS expenses in a year isn't a worry, it's a write-off.
I want a free tier with a lock on it. I'd very much appreciate advice for what tiers would fit my monthly use if I hit free tier caps, but if I got hit with $500 right now I'd be ruined.
I think my Google compute stuff is safe, but I really don't like having any doubt.
I closed an AWS account for this reason just a few days ago, we hadn't used it for a while but there was no clear way to remove our credit card so it felt like a risk just to have it open, what if a developer logs in to mess around and accidentally flips some switch that smacks us with a charge of a couple grand... unlikely, sure, but the fact that it's even possible is terrible system design. Better to just nuke the account and move on to other cloud providers that don't make it harder for me to sleep at night.
I don’t use them for any projects mostly because I already don’t enjoy having to manage AWS at work all the time. I also don’t want to live/work in a world where AWS is my only option so I try and use smaller hosting providers and services like tarsnap.