> They refunded you $100k with few questions asked, and you hate them for it?
They exposed him to 100K of liability without any way to avoid it (other than to avoid AWS entirely), and then happened to blink, in this case, with no guarantee that it would happen again. If you don't happen to have a few hundred thousand liquid, suddenly getting a bill for 100K might well be a life-ruiningly stressful event.
Yes, he could have set up a billing alert that triggered an action to shut everything down. Easy way is to take away privileges from the IAM roles attached to the processes.
Bad design if that isn't in place for a new free-tier experiment.
This is the problem right here. I moved from AWS and specifically Beanstalk because I don't want to be some "certified AWS goblin". I just wanted to host something sensibly.
Other hosting companies don't have this problem and while I cannot complain about AWS as a service, this can be improved if there would be the will to do so. I believe there are other incentives at work here and that isn't a service to the customer.
There is no such thing as a “free tier” in AWS. At least there wasn’t until July of this year where you get a $200 credit and everything is blocked until you upgrade.
There were free services up to a certain usage limit in a month.