Dear Amazon, please make free tier ‘Idiot Proof’

Learning new technologies is a mix of enthusiasm, frustration and joy. Like any developer out there, I like exploring new technologies.

It was the start of 2015, I heard some good things about AWS and wanted to try it. One fine day, I created an account using my debit card, played with it briefly and forgot about it. Reason? as usual, life comes in the way.

I came back to it after a long gap in January 2016. This time I started doing some serious work by deploying some web development server on it. Everything going good…

Believe me on this one, One day, I had a realization that I was on free tier for too long. I didn’t remember the date on which I signed up for the account. I went to the aws console and tried looking for the free tier expiry date. None found. Their terms say you will get a mail months before your free tier expires. But I haven’t got any, I double checked my spam.

I got a bit panicked and shot a mail to the support guys. They came back saying that the free tier ended just last month. And saying sorry, they agreed that they haven’t send any mail because of some internal error. I hurriedly shut down the EC2 instances and deleted the S3 buckets, which I am not actively using. Felt relieved that it just ended last month.

Amazon is doing an awesome job by giving a free access to almost all the services. I have the best experience so far, except for these small things.

When I was signing up for AWS, lot of people warned me. They told the story of a guy who launched a couple instances, forgot to shutdown and never bothered to return. After a year or so, he got a huge bill and amazon was after him for recovery. I went to Amazon Awesome Day recently. During the session the educator narrated a similar story. I am not kidding!

These might be just rumors made up for fun. But one thing I have noticed is, these are the kind of things which are stopping some new developers from trying out the platform. What if I click something which launches a service I have to pay for, is the common fear.

Couple of things I have noticed which might help people who are new to AWS.

Having a track of the expiry date in the landing page notifying them. Sending an alert frequently or at least have an option to enable to receive frequent alerts regarding the services currently running. There should be a couple of mail notifications before the expiry date. ( which are somehow ignored in case of my account.)

We can setup bill monitoring but if you are just starting out that’s one thing you might miss out. Having fine grain monitoring of the bill during free tier period by default will help.

I found that EC2 instances are region specific, there is no consolidated view where you can get all the instances from all the regions. There are chances that the new developers will launch in one region and move on to another region and loose track of it.

These might be petty stuff for a seasoned developer. For some one who is completely new to cloud and on their first days of development, it gives them the confidence to explore the platform with out the fear of the bomb of a bill at the month end.

As I mentioned, I am starting out in AWS and if I made any wrong assumptions or there is a better way of doing things. Do let me know.

Thanks for reading and have a good day. Hope amazon comes up with a better support for the cloud noobs.