the risk is minimalized by reading the docs and proper planning.

EDIT: got to love the holy downvoters

I did not downvote this, but I have a comment: The risk is not "minimalized by reading the docs and proper planning". To minimize something means to reduce it to the smallest possible amount, and I do not like to take any chances whatsoever when a huge excess bill is a possible outcome of a single misconfigured setting that can only be ruled out by reading hundreds if not thousands of pages of documentation and then following the documentation without mistake to the letter.

There is a clear possible solution for reliably preventing any amount of unintended overpayment, and that would be to configure a hard billing limit that can never be exceeded, no matter what else is being configured. All services that generate additional costs would simply have to stop or be removed if the configured limit is exceeded.

That would truly minimize the risk, because any configuration error I make will then not lead to excess payment if I configure such a limit and the cloud provider respects it.

That's the point though. A beginner is going to make mistakes and should be able to learn in a safe environment. Think of a student on a tight budget at college or in a bootcamp, who has to learn AWS because it's on the curriculum.

Yep. I'm a novice at AWS. Last year I heard about RDS, and tried playing around with it.

I thought I had shut it down because I clicked some button that looked like it was the turn-off button. I let it go on for a few months, only to discover that I had been charged $1,500.

The one thing that really pissed me off was how easy it was to set up vs how hard it was to take it back down. I can't remember the details, but basically you cannot simply turn off an RDS instance only in the UI (even though you can turn it on in the UI). You have to install the SDK and perform some (seemingly complex) commands.

I tried explaining that I was a beginner, and that I made this mistake by accident, and that they could easily see that I had not actually used this instance at all or even put any data into the DB. But they wanted this huge list of things from me in order to refund it, like a super in-depth explanation of how it happened. Really shitty experience overall. So I canceled my AWS account and likely won't go back until I have a job that pays me to learn and use it.

You can ‘Stop’ a DB and ‘Terminate’ a DB through the UI. If you have deletion protection turned on, you can only stop the DB until it’s turned off, which can also be done through the UI.

You most likely stopped the DB, but the problem there is that AWS will automatically turn on the DB after 7 days. You also still get charged for storage for the time your DB is off.

Sorry to hear that though. I know it’s a really sucky situation to be in.

Ah yeah, I remember now. You could turn off the DB, but there was some other kind of scaffolding thing that I was still getting charged for. It seemed like an RDS-specific thing. They had to point me to a tutorial for turning that piece off.

>You could turn off the DB, but there was some other kind of scaffolding thing that I was still getting charged for.

It is a feature! /s

> I let it go on for a few months, only to discover that I had been charged $1,500.

You get billed monthly, so really, letting it go for a few months is on you.

> The one thing that really pissed me off was how easy it was to set up vs how hard it was to take it back down > You have to install the SDK and perform some (seemingly complex) commands.

Hu, no it's not. Really it's litterally one click to shutdown an RDS instance, and always has been.

> But they wanted this huge list of things from me in order to refund it, like a super in-depth explanation of how it happened.

I mean that makes sense to me. They did reserve and partially used these resources for you, so it's only fair that you have to go through the trouble of explaining why they would let it go. If there's no downside everyone would just reserve a bunch of resources all the time.

From your comment, it seems you didn't even bothered to answer their questions to get a refund, I would totally not hesitate to charge you if I was in AWS place.

> You get billed monthly, so really, letting it go for a few months is on you.

right? what a moron, that bill could have been a surprise of only $500!

/s

lol exactly. I've discussed this incident before on HN and had the same kind of "well tough luck but you deserved it" responses. They seem not to understand how off-putting it is to newcomers or students, to basically say "hey well YOU made a mistake, the trillion-dollar corporation SHOULD take your money, idiot!"

>I've discussed this incident before on HN and had the same kind of "well tough luck but you deserved it" responses.

Brush it off. I've worked with AWS pros who get lost in the billing. In my last job, we had a big "hackathon" where the objective was to reduce our AWS spend. Overall, we reduced our annual bill by a couple million dollars.

> From your comment

Pretty stupid to just assume that I "didn't even bother" to answer their questions. I'm not going to write a novel explaining every minutia of my interactions with AWS.

> letting it go is on you

I never said it wasn't. If you pay attention, you'll see that the context of this comment is discussing the "it's on you" culture surrounding AWS and how hostile it is to newcomers.

Exactly, it's pretty common for them to shoot their own foot with a couple of hundred dollar bill, just for one tiny instance with additional options that 'you have to do'.

IMO AWS is deliberately make these things happen and reimburse it later with excuses. It's rather a strategy at this point it seems like.

I don't think it's so much a money-grabbing strategy as the problem that AWS is less a suite of unified services and more a litter of puppies fighting in a sack. With that kind of org chart it's difficult to have a unified, simple billing experience with good beginner training-wheels and on-ramps.

>AWS is less a suite of unified services and more a litter of puppies fighting in a sack

Can I quote you on this? I'm going to quote you.

Doesn't the free tier cover a lot of what a student may want to do?

The free tier is just that, a tier (not a hard limit), and will not cover any use above the tier.

You're getting downvoted because you're victim blaming; a newbie shouldn't have to master anything to avoid a surprise bill.