

Ask HN: How do you learn to use AWS when you are terrified to being overcharged? - noreasonw

I don&#x27;t get any money from programming, and I would like to learn to use AWS but I am a very risk averse kind of people and I don&#x27;t want to be overcharge in case I do some silly thing in the web.  I would like a service that guarantees that no matter what happens you don&#x27;t pay more than a small amount for learning, I don&#x27;t mind if my code disappear from the server or the application is no longer working when the money is over. I imagine that working in the cloud is about being at risk but, just in the learning phase I would like to have the minimum risk when learning. Any ideas?
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Turing_Machine
They have a "billing alerts" feature that should help. It will send you email
if your charges exceed the amount you've set.

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noreasonw
If you are hacked the first thing the bad guys do is to disable your billing
alerts.

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Turing_Machine
Well, if you are hacked, you're not liable for the fraudulent charges anyway
(in the U.S.... mileage may vary elsewhere). Your CC company will charge it
back, in the unlikely event that Amazon didn't take care of it on their own
initiative (which they almost certainly would... as another poster noted, they
have a good reputation in that area).

I interpreted "doing something silly" as "firing up 10,000 instances and
forgetting to shut them back down", rather than fraud.

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autotune
AutoScale is the funnest part though...

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noreasonw
I found this, someone publishes his keys in the net and how to disable the
services: [http://zacharybears.com/amazon-aws-account-hacking-and-
how-t...](http://zacharybears.com/amazon-aws-account-hacking-and-how-to-avoid-
it/)

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codegeek
do you want to learn AWS specifcally or do you want to learn to code stuff in
general ?

If latter, may I suggest you try digitalocean then ? I know you are talking
about AWS sepcifically but for your use case, get a $5 DO VPS and play as much
as you want.

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auganov
Get a CC that allows you to set a low spending limit.

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gazarsgo
Open your account with a $100 Visa gift card.

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noreasonw
Can I use an anonymous user?, that is I don't want to disclose my name,
address, email or any other personal information

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Someone1234
No.

Amazon verifies accounts heavily to stop fraud and abuse. I needed a
legitimate telephone number (which they called).

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cpr
There are free micro instances, last I knew.

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noreasonw
Unfortunately the word free is a little ambiguous since it can be free (as in
beer) but suddenly you are charged because you make something stupid (or
someone hacked your account and created a zillion services)

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autotune
Which is why you enable Multi Factor Authentication beforehand and make sure
the roles you assign the instances you create don't have write access except
for the one bastion, which you make sure doesn't have root login or even
access to the public internet except for your IP but still have access to your
private servers via VPCs.

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mindcrime
One thing AWS doesn't have, is a feature to let you forcibly terminate
instances based on a billing limit or a time schedule. But, micro instances
are so cheap (and even free for a time), that you can probably afford to set
up a single micro instance, and put a watchdog process on there that will use
the API to monitor your instances and terminate them if you forget and leave
ones running or something.

