Episode Details

About Corey Quinn

Over the course of my career, I’ve worn many different hats in the tech world: systems administrator, systems engineer, director of technical operations, and director of DevOps, to name a few. Today, I’m a cloud economist at The Duckbill Group, the author of the weekly Last Week in AWS newsletter, and the host of two podcasts: Screaming in the Cloud and, you guessed it, AWS Morning Brief, which you’re about to listen to.

Links

• CHAOSSEARCH
• @QuinnyPig
• Chris Short’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thechrisshort/

Transcript

Corey: Welcome to AWS Morning Brief: Whiteboard Confessional. I’m Cloud Economist Corey Quinn. This weekly show exposes the semi-polite lie that is whiteboard architecture diagrams. You see, a child can draw a whiteboard architecture, but the real world is a mess. We discuss the hilariously bad decisions that make it into shipping products, the unfortunate hacks the real-world forces us to build, and that the best to call your staging environment is “theory”. Because invariably whatever you’ve built works in the theory, but not in production. Let’s get to it.

This episode is sponsored in part by ParkMyCloud, fellow worshipers at the altar of turned out [BLEEP] off. ParkMyCloud makes it easy for you to ensure you're using public cloud like the utility it's meant to be. just like water and electricity, You pay for most cloud resources when they're turned on, whether or not you're using them. Just like water and electricity, keep them away from the other computers. Use ParkMyCloud to automatically identify and eliminate wasted cloud spend from idle, oversized, and unnecessary resources. It's easy to use and start reducing your cloud bills. get started for free at parkmycloud.com/screaming.

When you're building on a given cloud provider, you're always going to have concerns. If you're building on top of Azure, for example, you're worried your licenses might lapse. If you're building on top of GCP, you're terrified that they're going to deprecate all of GCP before you get your application out the door. If you're building on Oracle Cloud, you're terrified, they'll figure out where you live and send a squadron of attorneys to sue you just on general principle. And if you build on AWS, you're constantly living in fear, at least in a personal account, that they're going to surprise you with a bill that's monstrous.

Today, I want to talk about a particular failure that a friend of this podcast named Chris Short experienced. Chris is not exactly a rank neophyte to the world of Cloud. He currently works at IBM Hat, which I'm told is the post-merger name. He was deep in the Ansible community. He's a Cloud Native Computing Foundation Ambassador, which means that every third word out of his mouth is now contractually obligated to be Kubernetes.

He was building out a static website hosting environment in his AWS account, and it was costing him between $10 and $30 a month. That is right aligned with what I tend to cost. And he wound up getting his bill at the end of the month: “Welcome to July, time to get your bill,” and it was a bit higher. Instead of $30, or even $40 a month, it was $2700. And now there was actual poop found in his pants.