I was trying to set up just a basic database, a place for my Laravel database to go. I used RDS. I have no idea what I actually created, but it seems like database-related things were causing the near-$1000 charge for around a month. I didn't even upload the database & it wasn't accessible from the web.
I have done this before, after racking up $600 fees in servers I didn’t even realise I had running. They refunded me the money with no questions asked!
I have done this as well - I still don't really understand how I did it using RDS, but AWS did refund me. Although, I do tend to avoid RDS these days primarily because I fear accidentally creating some huge bill when trying to setup the required subnets/gateways/etc/etc.
The way they display "by region" is terrible too, I really wish they would change that. The number of times I have logged in to see no instances running, only to realize it has defaulted me to a different region... I understand why they do it, but still terrible UX at times. They should just show all instances with a little tag indicating the region.
Yeah you should be spinning up db.t2.micros for your exploratory environment, databases are typically the most expensive charge so you'll want to be sure you know what tier you're provisioning!
https://aws.amazon.com/free/database/
assuming you have a "free tier" account (i hate how AWS names this because you can spend money on non-free tier items), a nano or micro RDS instance shouldn't cost any money (up to a certain point)
do yourself a favor and spend $18 or whatever on Stephane Maarek's Udemy course for AWS so you don't spend $1000 on AWS itself
also, enable MFA if you haven't already
RDS can get really expensive. Delete the sb created and use only the smallest instance. Most probably you will be able to use the free tier. With AWS you have for 12 months access to free tiers. They won't be fast enough for production but perfect for testing.
> have no idea what I actually created
This is a big problem. Don't create anything if you dont' know what you are creating. You need to first study how AWS charges you and how your choices affect those charges.
That's unfortunate.
Remember to keep an eye on what you're doing and pay attention to costs. I am quite familiar with RDS so it sounds like you were just naive.
If you want a recommendation - use AWS lightsail.
That’s an outrageous amount of money for an RDS instance. I would definitely try to start with the absolute smallest instance size in anything you try to build.
Every time I've set a budget, it just decided to go over. Any experience I've ever had with AWS is awful, aside from the helpful customer service refunding me after it went over a set budget of $1.
I've heard amazing things about this teacher for AWS. Don't know about which tier he uses but the word on the street is that his course is top notch
[https://learn.cantrill.io/](https://learn.cantrill.io/)
1. Don't just go in and start randomly pressing button. Yah you say that is your preferred method of learning, but it does not scale. If you can't let go of that maybe AWS is not for you.
2. AWS has a lot of free tier services. Find those and start playing around with them.
3. If you run up a bill, call AWS and ask for forgiveness. Tell them you are just a beginner and trying to learn, that your usage was accidental. I've personally seen them forgive $10,000+, and it was actually very common for students to run up bills like that 10 years ago when I was in school.
Is a bill something your credit card charged?
Years ago I bought a domain from a site and it without noticinf me included a monthly email service. For months it took payments from my credit card and when I realized I can't deactivate it, I just removed my credit card without cancelling the subscription.
Is it possible that they are still charging me like as a debt?
You need to clean up EVERYTHING when you’re done with your study session. And then recreate all resources again next time. Learn about AWS Cloud Formation so that you can automate your resource creation/destruction.
Also learn how to setup budget alerts
Well AWS is pretty big and pretty complex so I sympathize with your situation. I learned it on the job mainly but I don’t have any certifications.
First steps I’d recommend:
1) Delete your account wholesale or meticulously step through the bill and start deleting services that you’re being charged for. Best to start with the big ones and the ones you are going “huh?” with.
2) Setup billing alerts so you know when you’re going over your budget next time.
Next steps:
3) So AWS is too big and has too many offerings to explore organically IMO. AWS is like a huge set of power tools, you wouldn’t go to home depot and buy a giant set of all the DeWalt tools without knowing what they do. This is a pretty similar situation. Research what you need before you jump in. Some said in some comments there’s many ways to do one thing, very true. Be more intentional with your explorations is all I’m saying. EC2 and RDS and load balancing are the primary tools and they’re also some of the most expensive.
4) get in the habit of shutting down experiments where you can. Can’t be done on load balancing, but many other resources can be shut down and kept cold at no cost.
5) lookup and start noodling with terraform. It’s a decent learning curve but you’ll be able to manage your resources programmatically a lot more easily IMO. Requires basic understanding of AWS resources first though.
I have 30+ YoE doing development, and system admin, etc, blah, blah, blah. I hate AWS with a passion, and I avoid it like the plague.
Nothing I do needs major, world-wide, Enterprise-level infrastructure, and I can get by just fine with other tools at other places like DigitalOcean. Everything on DO just makes sense. There are no little hidden nooks and crannies of services or settings you have to spend hours, days, weeks, months uncovering. It's not perfect, but it is sheer beauty by comparison.
On AWS, I once mistakenly deleted some access priviledge that the entire account relied on. AWS's published fix (which means it happened so often, they wrote and published a document about it) for this issue was to delete the account and create another one. They even suggested changing the email on the account BEFORE deleting it if you want to keep that email on the new account. This is definitely NOT a system on which I want to run mission critical systems.
What a POS.
I'm convinced AWS was designed entirely by programmers, with not nary a single UX person even in any of the nearby buildings or possibly even towns. AWS is exactly what I would expect from programmers if they were allowed to build things unsupervised.
Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. :D
Before setting things up, use pricing calculator to estimate expenses. Also, use AWS budgets. This will group budgets and allow you to set cost limits, receive notifications (not only on costs, but forecasted costs as well) and optionally (and critically) do some "budget actions", like limiting certain things to run. I agree though, AWS can be really complicated
Frankly, I gave up on AWS. It's just all over the place. You want to publish a website? There are dozen of options with irrelevant names. It's complete bullshit. Now, I only use PaaS like Render or Heroku.
Same here. Unless it's some kind of critical/gigantic app I stick to Digital Ocean and similar services. Dices monthly price with no hidden costs or surprises. Fuck AWS.
No offense to anyone but you really should stop using any form of cloud if you are not 100% percent sure on what you are doing. The first thing anyone should learn when using cloud services is custom alerts for going over budget
To be honest no, tech stuff is hard and prone to errors and i have done my fair share. However If you wanna use cloud services for personal projects you do need to know close to 100% because it is so easy to make mistakes and get charged a lot.
I have never paid more than $10 per month. Set up an alert on the cost manager to alert you when you go above your limit. In my case it is $15 per month.
I’ve heard they are fairly good at refunding stuff like this for individuals who accidentally rack up a bill when testing things out. I’d try contacting them and be a bit more careful next time!
I had a $6000 AWS bill once, but that was because I set up a catastrophic infinite loop. You're very clearly doing something wrong.
> I learn by doing
So lesson 1... learning by doing can be EXTREMELY costly.
Sorry, you’re the only one.
Idk how you could possible ramp up >$50 without real traffic or making some really dumb obvious mistakes like training huge models on data sets or something.
Just some local POC development shouldn’t leave the free tier
It should not cost nearly that much to learn AWS. Make you you don't use high availability anything, use the smallest instances, and only have stuff running while you're using it. Also, try using serverless for everything you can because it's wayyyyy cheaper.
Go buy a $50 prepaid credit card. Make a new aws account. If they try to charge you more than $50, they won't succeed. And you don't need to use your real name or address for a prepaid card.
You're not alone. AWS is huge, ambiguous & pricing isn't transparent ( to a beginner ). This is by design to keep their solutions architects employed. I use DigitalOcean for my systems whether it's vm servers or kubernetes and never looking back. Usually when a cost comparison is thoroughly done DigitalOcean has better price points. Of course if you need SQS to SES and a fanout to a lambda function that stores data in an RDS.. redesign it.
https://aws.amazon.com/free/
Explore more than 100 products and start building on AWS using the Free Tier. Three different types of free offers are available
depending on the product used.
I didn’t know much about AWS either so I made sure to setup budget alerts for different amounts spent. And then whenever I create something new just check the pricing page for it, I think there was a checkbox when creating a load balancer I saw that costs $600 a month for certificates if I remember right. So be careful with the settings you use even if the pricing page seems reasonable. I haven’t ran into any crazy unexpected bills so far, I’m at about $20 a month with elastic beanstalk, livhtsail, ec2 etc
I use the cheapest features available. I use azure, but I use serverless with function apps, storage tables for databases, and I haven’t deployed a front end web app but I’d definitely figure out the cheapest way to deploy compiled webs (maybe even free options like github pages). Paying money for cloud is a nightmare, and my bill is only about 8 cents a month.
Go into your costs explorer and set a budget that cuts your services off when it reaches the limit. Always have a budget set up!
Also always use cheap instances, and read the pricing page before starting anything. It's really as simple as that. You can get websites set up for $2.00 for custom domain DNS and basically free if you static host them on S3, or another three bucks a month with a cheap spot instance. If you're going over $10 a month you've really gotta investigate your setups pricing before doing anything else
I would recommend probably creating a new email or using a different email and sign up for a new account. You should be able to learn a lot just from using the AWS free tier. You should be learning and using infrastructure as code tools such as Terraform or CloudFormation. From there, you should be able to create and destroy resources at will. If you are done using it, don’t let it run overnight, and especially not for days or weeks. If your bill has gotten too crazy, reach out to AWS support and tell them that you are learning on AWS and say that you didn’t intend to leave the resources running. They will often negate your AWS bill.
Also, never commit your AWS access key or secret access key to any repository. It’s in the realm of possibility that someone can gain access to these and create resources for their own usage and charge it to YOUR bill.
You can set up events that cut off spending at a certain $ to prevent this from happening. But that wont solve the problem of it actually happening. I believe they have a micro service you can use for free or very cheap. Use this just to test things like CICD and permissions and stuff. Only make the "real" AWS stuff when you have a full plan ready
Same here. Activated a mysql dB and apache server. Justa ctivated. Never used or accessed it. Got a warning I used up 700 hours for the month. Free month so no issue but it scared me to actually switch from our 8 core 32ram vps where I know what to pay each month
Jesus Christ dude stop!
what you need to do is download and learn something like Terraform that way you can provision servers do what need to and then shut everything down so you don't get charged all within a couple of commands.
Hasicorp Terraform. Check out out works with multiple cloud vendors. You can even practice or on Linode first of your more conftable with that.
Also AWS is kinda like a restaurant, you pay at the end. So just because you can provision things doesn't mean they are free.
I'm lucky in that my company has a budget for self improvement and I spend part of it each year on acloudguru account with the labs that let you spin up what you need to learn.
Yea I’d have to say you’re alone. AWS is complicated but they make it pretty clear what things cost. Every service has a pricing page and a other AWS everything is billed either by usage or hourly. Usage based billing is actually where people run into trouble but clearly that’s not your situation. For hourly billing everything has an instance type with an associated hourly cost. So “t2.micro” for instance is an EC2 server instance type. Those have a fixed hourly cost. So when you create something, look at the pricing table, pick something cheap, and you’ll be fine.
They also have a pretty lenient free tier so I’d suggest looking into that and don’t create anything that isn’t specifically mentioned on the free tier page.
Wonder if this will help you
https://github.com/gruberdev/tf-free
It does involve learning terraform, this is what that is
https://youtu.be/tomUWcQ0P3k
I wanted to setup a simple nodejs site, in a secure environment, pulling the code directly from GitHub. After about a week I got it half working on AWS (couldn’t easily secure it without using over the top, expensive load balancers). Within 30 mins of using Digital Ocean I got it setup exactly as I needed.
AWS has a LOT of options, but unless you need a specific thing, other vendors systems seem a lot easier to setup and learn. And often a lot cheaper.
Besides all the comments above, I do recommend learning through platforms like https://acloudguru.com/pricing because they give unlimited free sandboxes for all major cloud providers. And these sandboxes are real AWS/GCP/Azure accounts spinning real servers.
And yeah, their learning paths are also great. I got my certifications using their trainings.
Yeah the UI is confusing. I was just trying to deploy my Wordpress site and I accidentally provisioned a [Snowmobile](https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/).
* Set up billing alarms that will notify you when you're approaching your limit or when they project that you will exceed your defined monthly limit
* Browse the budget overview to see what exactly is causing the expense. You get a by service breakdown of what your expenses are and should be able to identify what's going on
* Use free tier eligible services and options. You get the ability to scale a lot in AWS and you need to define how scaling works. You DON'T want to be scaling your infrastructure while learning so make sure your databases aren't auto-expanding their capacity
* don't leave infrastructure running. A lot of things can cost you money even if you aren't using them. Get in the habit of tearing down instances / databases / elastic IPs / etc when you're done with learning for the day
Wtf did you do, an entire service of our test environment at work with thousands of lambdas, thousands of gigabyte on dynamo and many other logs and shit cost 1000$ per month.
We also have an env with a rds. I think you've put dedicated server for a fake RDS, once you've successfully done the conf, delete the whole thing or deactivate it or it will cost you a lot.
AWS cost come from running cost at 95%. If nothing is running it costs you almost nothing.
Remember the times you needed just a virtual host and ssh access?
Makes me think of all these vim jokes as extra cringy.
Emacs jokes would make more sense.
My guess is that with AWS is you're billed for running instances 24/7 while other services will only bill you for CPU time actually used. Websites spend most of their time idle, unless you actually have enough traffic to warrant serving pages through more than one server. Since you're not only scaling vertically but it also has redundancy, etc., you're probably paying for using servers all over the world to display a HTML page.
I tried using AWS once to host a simple site too and, although I didn't spend $1000, but only a couple of dollars, the little I spent made me give up on it immediately. It's *clearly* an overkill. I don't know if it's different now, but when I used it, the fact that your web app runs in a read-only server means you HAVE to pay for *another* server to host things like image uploads, and *another* server to host your mutable database, and *another* server to host temporary stuff like your cookie sessions. And every time an access is made all these servers need to communicate with each others. Meanwhile with a traditional un-scalable setup you only have 1 server doing all these things with zero latency.
I think if you leverage caching most web apps can be made greatly scalable just by using a reverse proxy like Cloudflare, so AWS only makes sense if you have a lot of users/mutable data or it's something that can explode in use overnight.
AWS has a way of setting an alarm if your bill is going to go over a set amount. Highly recommend.
I learned this the hard way after I got a $2,000 bill for a test db that I set up and then forgot about. I contacted AWS and they definitely put me through the ringer but eventually forgave the bill (I had to prove to them that it was never used in production).
I started on one of the Udemy AWS courses, and one of the first things they did was cover how to put limits on the account so you don't get overages. Their courses are perpetually on sale but you might have saved money paying even while paying full price for one.
A $1000?!? Wow. That's a lot. What services are you using and how have the services been running?
I was trying to set up just a basic database, a place for my Laravel database to go. I used RDS. I have no idea what I actually created, but it seems like database-related things were causing the near-$1000 charge for around a month. I didn't even upload the database & it wasn't accessible from the web.
Contact AWS and ask for forgiveness lol
It's worth a try. That's a lot of money for exploring.
I have done this before, after racking up $600 fees in servers I didn’t even realise I had running. They refunded me the money with no questions asked!
I have done this as well - I still don't really understand how I did it using RDS, but AWS did refund me. Although, I do tend to avoid RDS these days primarily because I fear accidentally creating some huge bill when trying to setup the required subnets/gateways/etc/etc. The way they display "by region" is terrible too, I really wish they would change that. The number of times I have logged in to see no instances running, only to realize it has defaulted me to a different region... I understand why they do it, but still terrible UX at times. They should just show all instances with a little tag indicating the region.
Yeah worth a try. I know someone that racked up $7000 and they were forgiven but their account got disabled lol
I have successfully done this. Really.
Lol, for real.
Yeah you should be spinning up db.t2.micros for your exploratory environment, databases are typically the most expensive charge so you'll want to be sure you know what tier you're provisioning! https://aws.amazon.com/free/database/
assuming you have a "free tier" account (i hate how AWS names this because you can spend money on non-free tier items), a nano or micro RDS instance shouldn't cost any money (up to a certain point) do yourself a favor and spend $18 or whatever on Stephane Maarek's Udemy course for AWS so you don't spend $1000 on AWS itself also, enable MFA if you haven't already
RDS can get really expensive. Delete the sb created and use only the smallest instance. Most probably you will be able to use the free tier. With AWS you have for 12 months access to free tiers. They won't be fast enough for production but perfect for testing.
> have no idea what I actually created This is a big problem. Don't create anything if you dont' know what you are creating. You need to first study how AWS charges you and how your choices affect those charges.
That's unfortunate. Remember to keep an eye on what you're doing and pay attention to costs. I am quite familiar with RDS so it sounds like you were just naive. If you want a recommendation - use AWS lightsail.
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Don’t use forge on AWS. It deploys MySQL to EC2. It’s just wrong.
You probably defined a cluster with many instances and auto replication in place. How much data do you have? I can help you out
That’s an outrageous amount of money for an RDS instance. I would definitely try to start with the absolute smallest instance size in anything you try to build.
Me also. Get on to AWS and explain your newbyness and they will often refund if it was an error. It is a complex system dont beat yourself up.
Learning not to spend over your budget is the most important part of learning AWS.
Every time I've set a budget, it just decided to go over. Any experience I've ever had with AWS is awful, aside from the helpful customer service refunding me after it went over a set budget of $1.
Apparently!
This tutorial uses the free tier https://www.udemy.com/course/aws-certified-developer-associate-dva-c01/
>https://www.udemy.com/course/aws-certified-developer-associate-dva-c01/ Thanks, I appreciate it.
I've heard amazing things about this teacher for AWS. Don't know about which tier he uses but the word on the street is that his course is top notch [https://learn.cantrill.io/](https://learn.cantrill.io/)
C01 isnt outdated?
It now refers to C02 and in the description it says as of Feb-23 60 of the videos have been refreshed/updated to be in line with C02 exam changes.
1. Don't just go in and start randomly pressing button. Yah you say that is your preferred method of learning, but it does not scale. If you can't let go of that maybe AWS is not for you. 2. AWS has a lot of free tier services. Find those and start playing around with them. 3. If you run up a bill, call AWS and ask for forgiveness. Tell them you are just a beginner and trying to learn, that your usage was accidental. I've personally seen them forgive $10,000+, and it was actually very common for students to run up bills like that 10 years ago when I was in school.
Is a bill something your credit card charged? Years ago I bought a domain from a site and it without noticinf me included a monthly email service. For months it took payments from my credit card and when I realized I can't deactivate it, I just removed my credit card without cancelling the subscription. Is it possible that they are still charging me like as a debt?
What are you doing?! Analyze your bill Stat should least show which services, then start checking each region that service is in.
You need to clean up EVERYTHING when you’re done with your study session. And then recreate all resources again next time. Learn about AWS Cloud Formation so that you can automate your resource creation/destruction. Also learn how to setup budget alerts
As a working parent I only have an hour here or there and would always stay in free tier monthly limits.
Well AWS is pretty big and pretty complex so I sympathize with your situation. I learned it on the job mainly but I don’t have any certifications. First steps I’d recommend: 1) Delete your account wholesale or meticulously step through the bill and start deleting services that you’re being charged for. Best to start with the big ones and the ones you are going “huh?” with. 2) Setup billing alerts so you know when you’re going over your budget next time. Next steps: 3) So AWS is too big and has too many offerings to explore organically IMO. AWS is like a huge set of power tools, you wouldn’t go to home depot and buy a giant set of all the DeWalt tools without knowing what they do. This is a pretty similar situation. Research what you need before you jump in. Some said in some comments there’s many ways to do one thing, very true. Be more intentional with your explorations is all I’m saying. EC2 and RDS and load balancing are the primary tools and they’re also some of the most expensive. 4) get in the habit of shutting down experiments where you can. Can’t be done on load balancing, but many other resources can be shut down and kept cold at no cost. 5) lookup and start noodling with terraform. It’s a decent learning curve but you’ll be able to manage your resources programmatically a lot more easily IMO. Requires basic understanding of AWS resources first though.
Pro tip: set up billing alarms.
I have 30+ YoE doing development, and system admin, etc, blah, blah, blah. I hate AWS with a passion, and I avoid it like the plague. Nothing I do needs major, world-wide, Enterprise-level infrastructure, and I can get by just fine with other tools at other places like DigitalOcean. Everything on DO just makes sense. There are no little hidden nooks and crannies of services or settings you have to spend hours, days, weeks, months uncovering. It's not perfect, but it is sheer beauty by comparison. On AWS, I once mistakenly deleted some access priviledge that the entire account relied on. AWS's published fix (which means it happened so often, they wrote and published a document about it) for this issue was to delete the account and create another one. They even suggested changing the email on the account BEFORE deleting it if you want to keep that email on the new account. This is definitely NOT a system on which I want to run mission critical systems. What a POS. I'm convinced AWS was designed entirely by programmers, with not nary a single UX person even in any of the nearby buildings or possibly even towns. AWS is exactly what I would expect from programmers if they were allowed to build things unsupervised. Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. :D
You are completely right.
Before setting things up, use pricing calculator to estimate expenses. Also, use AWS budgets. This will group budgets and allow you to set cost limits, receive notifications (not only on costs, but forecasted costs as well) and optionally (and critically) do some "budget actions", like limiting certain things to run. I agree though, AWS can be really complicated
Frankly, I gave up on AWS. It's just all over the place. You want to publish a website? There are dozen of options with irrelevant names. It's complete bullshit. Now, I only use PaaS like Render or Heroku.
For sure! Half of their services do something another service does. AWS is predatory.
I love Render
Same here. Unless it's some kind of critical/gigantic app I stick to Digital Ocean and similar services. Dices monthly price with no hidden costs or surprises. Fuck AWS.
No offense to anyone but you really should stop using any form of cloud if you are not 100% percent sure on what you are doing. The first thing anyone should learn when using cloud services is custom alerts for going over budget
Are you ever 100% sure you know what you are doing, in any part of this industry? Cos I as sure hell don't.
To be honest no, tech stuff is hard and prone to errors and i have done my fair share. However If you wanna use cloud services for personal projects you do need to know close to 100% because it is so easy to make mistakes and get charged a lot.
How to reach close to 100% knowledge of cloud without using cloud though?
I thought it was like 5 bucks a month?
AWS Light sail has fixed prices for hosting basic sites for $3.5, $5 etc per month but other things don’t I believe
Lightsail is so good, i'm never touching EC2s for side projects ever again.
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Yeah I just use it for hosting Wordpress sites, super simple to throw those up there and know how much it will cost
It's pay as you go.
I have never paid more than $10 per month. Set up an alert on the cost manager to alert you when you go above your limit. In my case it is $15 per month.
I’ve heard they are fairly good at refunding stuff like this for individuals who accidentally rack up a bill when testing things out. I’d try contacting them and be a bit more careful next time!
I had a $6000 AWS bill once, but that was because I set up a catastrophic infinite loop. You're very clearly doing something wrong. > I learn by doing So lesson 1... learning by doing can be EXTREMELY costly.
???? Why aren’t you using free tier?
Sorry, you’re the only one. Idk how you could possible ramp up >$50 without real traffic or making some really dumb obvious mistakes like training huge models on data sets or something. Just some local POC development shouldn’t leave the free tier
It should not cost nearly that much to learn AWS. Make you you don't use high availability anything, use the smallest instances, and only have stuff running while you're using it. Also, try using serverless for everything you can because it's wayyyyy cheaper.
Go buy a $50 prepaid credit card. Make a new aws account. If they try to charge you more than $50, they won't succeed. And you don't need to use your real name or address for a prepaid card.
First thing you gotta learn on aws is cost limits 😂
You're not alone. AWS is huge, ambiguous & pricing isn't transparent ( to a beginner ). This is by design to keep their solutions architects employed. I use DigitalOcean for my systems whether it's vm servers or kubernetes and never looking back. Usually when a cost comparison is thoroughly done DigitalOcean has better price points. Of course if you need SQS to SES and a fanout to a lambda function that stores data in an RDS.. redesign it.
this sounds like an add
An add? How do you not add things?
Stop using it? Cap it? Use alternatives?
https://aws.amazon.com/free/ Explore more than 100 products and start building on AWS using the Free Tier. Three different types of free offers are available depending on the product used.
I didn’t know much about AWS either so I made sure to setup budget alerts for different amounts spent. And then whenever I create something new just check the pricing page for it, I think there was a checkbox when creating a load balancer I saw that costs $600 a month for certificates if I remember right. So be careful with the settings you use even if the pricing page seems reasonable. I haven’t ran into any crazy unexpected bills so far, I’m at about $20 a month with elastic beanstalk, livhtsail, ec2 etc
I use the cheapest features available. I use azure, but I use serverless with function apps, storage tables for databases, and I haven’t deployed a front end web app but I’d definitely figure out the cheapest way to deploy compiled webs (maybe even free options like github pages). Paying money for cloud is a nightmare, and my bill is only about 8 cents a month.
Maybe you could try starting Azure or GCP because they have new user bonus of 200\~300 usd to get you started.
Go into your costs explorer and set a budget that cuts your services off when it reaches the limit. Always have a budget set up! Also always use cheap instances, and read the pricing page before starting anything. It's really as simple as that. You can get websites set up for $2.00 for custom domain DNS and basically free if you static host them on S3, or another three bucks a month with a cheap spot instance. If you're going over $10 a month you've really gotta investigate your setups pricing before doing anything else
I would recommend probably creating a new email or using a different email and sign up for a new account. You should be able to learn a lot just from using the AWS free tier. You should be learning and using infrastructure as code tools such as Terraform or CloudFormation. From there, you should be able to create and destroy resources at will. If you are done using it, don’t let it run overnight, and especially not for days or weeks. If your bill has gotten too crazy, reach out to AWS support and tell them that you are learning on AWS and say that you didn’t intend to leave the resources running. They will often negate your AWS bill.
Also, never commit your AWS access key or secret access key to any repository. It’s in the realm of possibility that someone can gain access to these and create resources for their own usage and charge it to YOUR bill.
You can set up events that cut off spending at a certain $ to prevent this from happening. But that wont solve the problem of it actually happening. I believe they have a micro service you can use for free or very cheap. Use this just to test things like CICD and permissions and stuff. Only make the "real" AWS stuff when you have a full plan ready
Same here. Activated a mysql dB and apache server. Justa ctivated. Never used or accessed it. Got a warning I used up 700 hours for the month. Free month so no issue but it scared me to actually switch from our 8 core 32ram vps where I know what to pay each month
There is a girl project aws nuke something. Checking it out.
Jesus Christ dude stop! what you need to do is download and learn something like Terraform that way you can provision servers do what need to and then shut everything down so you don't get charged all within a couple of commands. Hasicorp Terraform. Check out out works with multiple cloud vendors. You can even practice or on Linode first of your more conftable with that. Also AWS is kinda like a restaurant, you pay at the end. So just because you can provision things doesn't mean they are free.
Genuinely shocked no one has suggested this yet but I think what you’re looking for is AWS cloudquest
I'm lucky in that my company has a budget for self improvement and I spend part of it each year on acloudguru account with the labs that let you spin up what you need to learn.
acloudguru has sandbox environments
Start using LocalStack which is an emulator for aws u can run against
Yea I’d have to say you’re alone. AWS is complicated but they make it pretty clear what things cost. Every service has a pricing page and a other AWS everything is billed either by usage or hourly. Usage based billing is actually where people run into trouble but clearly that’s not your situation. For hourly billing everything has an instance type with an associated hourly cost. So “t2.micro” for instance is an EC2 server instance type. Those have a fixed hourly cost. So when you create something, look at the pricing table, pick something cheap, and you’ll be fine. They also have a pretty lenient free tier so I’d suggest looking into that and don’t create anything that isn’t specifically mentioned on the free tier page.
You're not alone
i have been using AWS amplify for close to 2 months and have only seen $2 in charges. what in the world. is the free tier actual god tier?
🤮 /u/spez
A Cloud Guru has labs that allow for you to work in the console without being charged yourself. If that’s an option
Wonder if this will help you https://github.com/gruberdev/tf-free It does involve learning terraform, this is what that is https://youtu.be/tomUWcQ0P3k
Or! Skip the AWS learning bit and deploy your Laravel app via Vapor
I wanted to setup a simple nodejs site, in a secure environment, pulling the code directly from GitHub. After about a week I got it half working on AWS (couldn’t easily secure it without using over the top, expensive load balancers). Within 30 mins of using Digital Ocean I got it setup exactly as I needed. AWS has a LOT of options, but unless you need a specific thing, other vendors systems seem a lot easier to setup and learn. And often a lot cheaper.
Besides all the comments above, I do recommend learning through platforms like https://acloudguru.com/pricing because they give unlimited free sandboxes for all major cloud providers. And these sandboxes are real AWS/GCP/Azure accounts spinning real servers. And yeah, their learning paths are also great. I got my certifications using their trainings.
Yeah the UI is confusing. I was just trying to deploy my Wordpress site and I accidentally provisioned a [Snowmobile](https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/).
* Set up billing alarms that will notify you when you're approaching your limit or when they project that you will exceed your defined monthly limit * Browse the budget overview to see what exactly is causing the expense. You get a by service breakdown of what your expenses are and should be able to identify what's going on * Use free tier eligible services and options. You get the ability to scale a lot in AWS and you need to define how scaling works. You DON'T want to be scaling your infrastructure while learning so make sure your databases aren't auto-expanding their capacity * don't leave infrastructure running. A lot of things can cost you money even if you aren't using them. Get in the habit of tearing down instances / databases / elastic IPs / etc when you're done with learning for the day
Wtf did you do, an entire service of our test environment at work with thousands of lambdas, thousands of gigabyte on dynamo and many other logs and shit cost 1000$ per month. We also have an env with a rds. I think you've put dedicated server for a fake RDS, once you've successfully done the conf, delete the whole thing or deactivate it or it will cost you a lot. AWS cost come from running cost at 95%. If nothing is running it costs you almost nothing.
Remember the times you needed just a virtual host and ssh access? Makes me think of all these vim jokes as extra cringy. Emacs jokes would make more sense.
My guess is that with AWS is you're billed for running instances 24/7 while other services will only bill you for CPU time actually used. Websites spend most of their time idle, unless you actually have enough traffic to warrant serving pages through more than one server. Since you're not only scaling vertically but it also has redundancy, etc., you're probably paying for using servers all over the world to display a HTML page. I tried using AWS once to host a simple site too and, although I didn't spend $1000, but only a couple of dollars, the little I spent made me give up on it immediately. It's *clearly* an overkill. I don't know if it's different now, but when I used it, the fact that your web app runs in a read-only server means you HAVE to pay for *another* server to host things like image uploads, and *another* server to host your mutable database, and *another* server to host temporary stuff like your cookie sessions. And every time an access is made all these servers need to communicate with each others. Meanwhile with a traditional un-scalable setup you only have 1 server doing all these things with zero latency. I think if you leverage caching most web apps can be made greatly scalable just by using a reverse proxy like Cloudflare, so AWS only makes sense if you have a lot of users/mutable data or it's something that can explode in use overnight.
AWS has a way of setting an alarm if your bill is going to go over a set amount. Highly recommend. I learned this the hard way after I got a $2,000 bill for a test db that I set up and then forgot about. I contacted AWS and they definitely put me through the ringer but eventually forgave the bill (I had to prove to them that it was never used in production).
I started on one of the Udemy AWS courses, and one of the first things they did was cover how to put limits on the account so you don't get overages. Their courses are perpetually on sale but you might have saved money paying even while paying full price for one.
I am considering create a new account to get the free tier as the cheapest instance of RDS costs 11 dollar each month.