Growing Concerns among Developers about the AWS Free Tier

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2021-05-27 08:00:05

InfoQ Homepage News Growing Concerns among Developers about the AWS Free Tier

In recent weeks many experts in the AWS community have been advocating for sandbox accounts on AWS and hard billing limits that cannot be exceeded to let engineers experiment with new services without jeopardizing their personal well-being.

Forrest Brazeal, director of content & community at A Cloud Guru and AWS Serverless Hero, wrote the popular article "Please fix the AWS Free Tier before somebody gets hurt" that was triggered by a message on the A Cloud Guru Discord server.

This shouldn't be possible, period. There needs to be an easy, safe way for students to explore AWS without incurring unexpected megacharges.

All I can think of is that horrible story that appeared during the worst of the pandemic, about the young man who died believing he’d lost hundreds of thousands of dollars on the stock trading app Robinhood. And I keep thinking: what if this student hadn’t reached out to a developer community? What if AWS Support hadn’t been nudged on Twitter, and had taken a few days to get back? What if the costs (and the panic) had kept spiraling?