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by dkersten 845 days ago
I actually gave up on AWS forever when trying to use ECS. It was incredibly complex and it kept failing to deploy, but cloudeatch only contained log entries for it about 20% of the time. All I could do was click redeploy over and over — sometimes there were logs, usually not. And they charged me for every single deploy. After a day and a $100 bill later, I gave up and used DigitalOcean’s hosted docker instead. I had it up she’d rubbing in under ten minutes and no bill other than the actual usage costs.

Now I avoid AWS as much as I can. Of course my employers tend to be on AWS so sadly I can’t completely avoid it, but I do my best and would never recommend it anymore.
1 comments
infecto 845 days ago
Strange, maybe billing was different when you used it. ECS only charges for usage, you must have been requesting a lot of resources to rack up a cost that quickly. For example Ohio spot pricing is $0.01260298/hour/cpu. Deploying costs nothing.

It is a tool like any other and it is not as simple as DO's but its also a lot cheaper and more powerful once you learn the tooling. The logging on deployment is true but I think the majority/all issues I have seen with that is when the image is not configured correctly and cannot run when testing locally.

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dkersten 841 days ago
It was a problem on my end causing it, yes, but the point was that AWS deployment logs were next to useless as they didn’t even show the majority of times. On digitalocean, I got logs every time and after four or five deploy attempts had it narrowed down enough to fix my problem and get it working. All without a bill.

I don’t remember what I was charged for, I assumed it was because it was counting the few seconds of running time at the minimum billed time each time I deployed, but I’m unsure. This was in 2020. All I know is that I had a reasonably simple setup, there was an issue where it wouldn’t successfully start up, but logging was flaky at best and I was charged for my attempts.

I’ve been using AWS for years, at various employers and my own last startups, and it’s far more complex than many of its competitors. That’s ok when you need all of its features, but if you need just one or two, then the complexity gets in the way.

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