I am about to use some AWS services for the first time and I am a bit worried about the disasters that happen because of the pay-for-what-you-use business modal, a simple loop can cause you a 5 figure bill.
So I am asking about the necessary things I should know as a beginner AWS user to avoid such problems.
Also, any other info/advice to reduce costs is welcome.
The services I will be using are S3, Elemental MediaConvert, and CloudFront.
For video streaming.
- Setup aws billing cost alerts based on thresholds
- Consult AWS billing dashboard daily first, then weekly, then monthly. There is a "forecast" that can tell where you're going to land at the end of the month (ballpark).
- Understand how s3 charges, take advantage of the various storage classes. Setup s3 bucket lifecycle to delete objects if you have expiring objects.
- Make sure you setup backups. This can be a source-code repo or something like glacier. Make sure you understand how it works. tl;dr archiving is cheap, retrieving is expensive & slow.
- Make sure you understand how data transfer is charged on AWS (e.g. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/overview-of-data-t... - there are many others)
- Avoid services that use the AWS API to fetch metrics unless you have bandwidth to monitor closely. I've seen companies getting charged 6-7k/month for months, without anyone noticing, just because a prom exporter was abusing the API. When I took notice, three months in, I removed the exporter without letting anyone know. Scream-test was passed in flying colours, no one complained :-)
Good luck! :D
I also wish AWS offered more protection at say cdk or cloudformation level. A sort of "are you sure you want to do this" on capturing some event
I've seen this happen: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/w4eo12/usi...
I don't have any great pointers unfortunately, though I met someone not too long ago who has a product to help with monitoring AWS costs: https://www.cloudforecast.io/
Disclaimer: I've never used this tool as I don't use AWS but if I did have to use AWS, I would likely try something like this at least early in the game to avoid getting rekd.
We're a (mostly)bootstrap company, so it's always awesome to hear the "word of mouth" mention of my company. It means we're doing something right :).
Feel free to let me know if I can help in any way or answer any questions anyone might have!
If there’s any common pitfalls you’ve seen your customers run into and can share with OP, I’m sure (s)he would be grateful! :)
I'm just moving from somewhere with AWS and a large team supporting it onto Azure with a much smaller team where I'll have full access to creating any component and the billing information, will be interesting to see what happens. Even then though it's not really publicly accessible so we shouldn't get anything too unexpected.
You will eventually accidentally spend more than you want to. This is a feature. Just try to catch it early and course correct before annoying becomes disaster.
azure and GCP can be very annoying though