For personal stuff or business? I'm extremely familiar with AWS at the corporate level but I refuse to use it for personal stuff. Not only are the pricing schemes suspect, the results can be surprising. A single front page feature on HN, for example, could suddenly cost you $150,000 because you didn't wade through enough labyrinthine configuration pages to set the right budgets.
I hope you don't wake up 7 hours after a budget alert because you're in the wrong timezone. Please stop justifying the huge risks AWS knowingly carries. It would be easy to place a hard cap, but they refuse to do so.
AWS gives you all the tools you need to shoot your foot off, they also give you all the tools you need to avoid this. I can easily hook up a budget alert to a pushover alert on my phone that is just as likely to wake me up as any alert duty would.
So you're saying that if someone buys access to a kitchen, doesn't learn to cook or operate it safely, burns the place down trying to serve 100,000 people, they'll get a big insurance claim made against them and have a $150k bill? You're kidding me? Are you telling me people have to learn to USE these tools if they don't want a nasty surprise? :-P
(I'm being tongue-in-cheek cheeky here.)
I know you're mostly pushing boundaries with your $150k figure, although at this point it wouldn't surprise me, but AWS is a professional tool aimed at professional engineers. They created Lightsail for "personal stuff."
Right tool for the right job, I guess? Although tyou can actually combine the two on a network level (Lightsail and AWS, that is.)
Sure about that? So if I have static images going through an ALB to the requesting client, I can't operate in another way to reduce those costs? ... you're sure?
Sure you can front static assets with the free Cloudflare tier...
[a] which is fine if you're happy with the inflexibility that free Cloudflare offers. And you live in a country where the free tier doesn't have horrible routing (eg use the Sydney AWS region, put Cloudflare in front of it and then watch your traffic to/from Sydney take a round trip via the US or Singapore)
[b] every single AWS service charges egress fees (ie Cloudfront doesn't help at all)
No, but you're not the OP above my comment, so my question still stands.
> (eg use the Sydney AWS region, put Cloudflare in front of it and then watch your traffic to/from Sydney take a round trip via the US or Singapore)
I don't understand? I don't have this issue (I'm in Brisbane; I use ap-southeast-2)
> [c] this does nothing for non-static assets
Non-static assets are going to be very tiny in most cases, and the problem then becomes about volume. If you've got volume and your business model doesn't suck, then you can afford the rate (my understanding is AWS' network egress charges are gross compared to other vendors.)
Nice strawman. I never said you can't operate more efficiently.
Every service on AWS charges egress fees that's my comment. There are other cloud operators that do not. I can safely run some static compute / storage / network at a fixed cost, you can't do this on AWS.
If too many people come to my website it won't wipe out my credit card. The site might go offline but I'd rather take that than a huge bill.
> I can safely run some static compute / storage / network at a fixed cost, you can't do this on AWS.
No provider on the planet gives you truly unlimited, fixed cost networking throughput. None.
AWS provides Lightsail for a fixed cost, static compute, storage, and networking solution. It's a not strawman argument just because you don't understand it.
I ended up with a $700 bill for a month with Route 53 due to bogus DNS requests (a normal month would be like $5 or something). And there is nothing a professional engineer could do anything about it - except pay $3000/month for AWS Shield Advanced.
Can you share the gory details so we can learn more about this? It would be interesting to study what happened, in detail. Perhaps there was a misconfiguration?
There was no misconfiguration, just millions of DNS requests but not millions of actual users. I was in contact with AWS support multiple times. The only solution was so use AWS Shield Advanced. They did refund most of the charges but it was too risky for me. Even after I moved DNS provider there was DNS requests to the R53 zones. I can highly recommend https://dnsimple.com though.
BTW, EB (Elastic Beanstalk) is generally viewed as just for those getting started, but I've seen companies build really serious stuff (and at significant scale) on it, including an extremely high performance distributed IoT time series database (that was 10 years ago, back before there were good time series DBs to just use).
AWS doesn't push EB much, partly because it does offer great value and doesn't make them nearly as much money as things like FarGate or AppSync. If you need something that just does what really needs doing cheaply and well, though, give it another look.
AppRunner is great while being cheaper than Fargate, but it is not cheaper than its NewCloud counterparts like fly.io and render.com. Not sure if railway.app is, 'cause I never could wrap my head around their pricing model. Lightsail Containers are a credible alternative, too.
Whereas, Lambda / Lambda@Edge / CloudFront Functions are of course wayyyyy more expensive (even if more capable) than workers.dev.
Are you comparing Heroku to EC2 and other non-managed parts of AWS? Because for most parts Heroku and AWS is two different offerings. There are two main reasons to use Heroku: they manage it and they provide easy tools for configuration. Even if AWS provide similar managed services I would assume it is as the rest as AWS: a pain to configure. I use many AWS services and not only it is required to have a PhD in AWS to understand basic tasks but the risk of doing something wrong is high. Take IAM for example. Or just setting up a static website with S3, Cloudfront and Route 53 - what a mess. Not saying that AWS isn't great for many things or for companies wanting more control (and with resources to manage it), but comparing it to Heroku is for most parts not a valid comparison.
