[blagie]

TL;DR: Misleading title. Amazon service came through.

* Author clicked through Amazon UI/UX, and ended up with a huge bill.

* The UI/UX was confusing and poorly designed -- at no point was he shown he'd pay anything, let alone a lot.

* He was refunded the money AND given credits to make up for the hassle.

This is one of my key frustrations with Amazon. (1) I'd like services like RDS or similar on a pay-as-you-go fashion, rather than based on spun-up servers. I'd like SQL-as-a-service where I pay for actual storage and operations (without dedicated machines). (2) I'd like to understand pricing up-front, and be able to track what I'm paying.

Still, beats everything else.

[marcinzm]

>(1) I'd like services like RDS or similar on a pay-as-you-go fashion, rather than based on spun-up servers. I'd like SQL-as-a-service where I pay for actual storage and operations (without dedicated machines).

Seems a somewhat hard problem due to latency constraints and advantages of memory caches. For big data you have AWS Athena and Google Big Query. There's also auto-scaling if you're large enough of either read replicas (AWS Aurora) or the whole thing (Google Spanner).

>and be able to track what I'm paying.

Amazon does provide a nice billing dashboard which updates what you're going to pay throughout the month. Telling you ahead of time what the price will be per month of something would be nice.

[dvfjsdhgfv]

> * He was refunded the money AND given credits to make up for the hassle.

Yet, they stubbornly refuse the requests for a hard cap. People were asking for it for years. Some are using ugly hacks like trying prepaid cards: https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/8eaad5/use_a_prepaid_c...

[Mo3]

Point #2 is wrong. It would have been absolutely clear had he read the info box or cared. Look at the first screenshot.

[mwnivek]

Does Aurora Serverless meet your desired criteria, or are you looking for something else?

https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/serverless/

[blagie]

Not quite. Aurora serverless spins up machines for requests and spins them down. If I were paying just for storage and IOs, it'd be perfect. But I'm paying for ACU-hours. There is a 10 minute minimum charge, and an unknown ramp-up time if there are no ACUs spun up.

If I have a web app which is accessed once every 10 minutes (0.002 requests per second), I'll be paying for a full AWS machine. It should be a shared, scalable resource and abstraction.