[fabian2k]

The main reason I'd use a personal account for one of the big cloud providers would be to learn stuff. At that point a lack of professionalism is kinda expected, because learning stuff is the whole point.

And my understanding is that almost none of the way of setting limits are actual hard limits, but only alerts and some hacked-together emergency abort scripts. Correct me if I'm wrong, but can you actually limit the cost robustly for services that spend that much money in an hour or so? Doesn't help much if I get an email about it and read it two hours afterwards.

[bugbuddy]

I understand the down votes but I would still say that being aware of the rough estimate costs of each service you are using is an integral part of an engineer’s job. After all, we care a lot about CPU cycles and those are measured in femto dollars.

[fabian2k]

That's not sufficient, you also must not make mistakes.

I have very limited cloud experience, but I did make a mistake that lead to a rather slow but constant cost. The amount was small enough to not be relevant in a professional context, but the memorable part was that I could not pinpoint the source easily with the AWS tools and my limited understanding of them. The categories and labels were too broad, and it took a bit until I figured out what went wrong. There are certainly better tools to investigate this, but I didn't know them. In the end it was simply luck that the mistake still fell into an area of insignificant amounts of money, but it could have easily been significantly more if a few parameters had been different for the same mistake

[joepie91_]

You can call someone an 'engineer' with the associated responsibilities when they are getting paid for what they are doing like an engineer, in a setting that provides them with the protections of an engineer.

Until that point, they are just an individual who got screwed by disguised billing practices.