The Cloud Genie - Last Week in AWS
There’s a joke that I’ve always been partial to: a software engineering type rubs a lamp and a genie appears. The genie says that he’ll grant the engineer $1 billion, but only if they can spend $100 million in a single month with three rules. “You can’t gift it away. You can’t gamble with it. And you can’t throw it away.” The software engineer responds with “Well, can I use AWS?” The genie responds with “okay, there are four rules.”
So begins a reddit thread last week, and it got at a very interesting point given how abysmal AWS’s free tier is. Without reaching out to support, is it possible to spend $100m in a month, starting from zero, in an AWS account without increasing a service quota or otherwise talking to AWS about what you’re up to?
I’ve added some restrictions as well: it’s cheating to just go out and buy a bunch of 3 year RIs or Savings Plans; that’d be “one and then done” hack that wouldn’t make for a very interesting post. The actual dollar cost you’ll be able to get to is wildly variable depending upon a variety of factors (and let’s be serious; I’m not fool enough to try this in my account), but it’s comfortably in excess of the genie’s requirements.
