[csomar]

Honestly, kids (heck people below 23) shouldn't be allowed an AWS account. AWS also should have a strict cap on usage that's not "thousands of dollars". It's interesting they are yet to be regulated or sued for that. Having a web app where you can mistakenly (even without AI) click a button and get charged tens of thousands of dollars and only know that days later should have been unacceptable.

[dannyw]

I couldn't disagree more. I was playing around with AWS when I was probably 14 years old, with a credit card from my parents with consent, and a strict budget and the understanding that if I mess up and overspend, I'm getting disciplined.

I learned a lot of stuff about networking, how AWS works (VPCs, IAM, CloudWatch, etc) from trial and error, and hobby projects like personal websites (free tier), hosting a Minecraft server, etc.

Being too overprotective can have negative consequences on folks who are responsible. One of the things I love about the technology and internet communities, etc is that you're mostly judged based on how you act and behave; not your age or other visible characteristics.

[inigyou]

You don't have to use AWS though. Get one from Digital Ocean or Herzner, they have very predictable billing. Any button that costs money will tell you how much it costs per month.

[csomar]

> strict budget

How does that work in the case of AWS? Are you confusing alerts to caps?

[dannyw]

I meant a strict budget given by my parents (and I could ask for more with justification). One of the valuable lessons I have learned is that there's no spending caps on AWS, but it taught me to set up billing alerts :)

[watt]

the billing alerts DO NOT help. you may rack many thousands of $$$ before you know it.

[csomar]

You haven’t addressed the issue though? That or you don’t understand the issue (or think you have developed some super powers that make you perfect careful)

[Symbiote]

The equivalent 10+ years earlier was so much lower risk: £25 or so for an old computer at a junk sale, £4.99 for a magazine with a Linux CD-ROM to avoid a week-long download.

[ghaff]

Some variant of this topic comes up with some regularity. Leaving aside technical issues associated with implementing real-time hard caps, you still have a tradeoff. You either implement hard cutoffs which a student or someone else on a hard budget would like. Or you have a situation where an admin (or an admin who is no longer with a company) stuck some number in that seemed sensible at the time that brings down the company's whole system because of some sales spike.

I get that (and why) some people won't use AWS or its main competitors for this reason. But, frankly, they're not AWS's market and AWS will basically shrug.

[inigyou]

A possibility is to have KYC. I don't mean like a bank, but if you could sort your customers into a few broad categories (such as by asking them) that could help you tailor your service to each customer.

[stnikolauswagne]

Im kind of struggling with this logic, because a conscious choice was made to engage with AWS, AWS having opaque billing and the ability to provide a huge amount of compute (even at high cost) at the click of a button should be known to anyone who did his research on providers.

In my mind I could see a true tradeoff to removing the ability to do this. If I'm in a critical situtaion where, say, my service is on the cusp of failing because my revenue 100xed in a short while I know I could just go to AWS, put in some data and buy enough compute to survive as a business.

[csomar]

Anyone can make mistakes at some points and it's not like AWS UI/offerings make it any less confusing.