[HN Gopher] AWS Purity Test
___________________________________________________________________
AWS Purity Test
Author : notamy
Score : 119 points
Date : 2023-01-27 16:40 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.awspuritytest.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.awspuritytest.com)
| brightball wrote:
| > Got Covid at re:Invent
|
| I'm a little bummed there wasn't a "didn't get covid at
| re:Invent" option...
| dexterdog wrote:
| I was surprised it didn't have things about the number of
| reinvents attended. I only went to the first one and it was
| enough of a zoo that has only gotten zoo-ier so I have not been
| interested in going again. It was certainly worthwhile at the
| time, but I can't imagine how over-loaded they are now.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| I got a 94. :/
| oxfordmale wrote:
| FYI, my teenage daughter informed me this is a parody on a Purity
| Test going around at secondary schools. That purity tests is
| regarding romantic relationships and all its aspects.
| rconti wrote:
| I'm just impressed kids these days are keeping it alive
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| No, a "purity test" can be on any topic really and has been
| going on at least since I remember in the late 80s.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purity_test
| ladberg wrote:
| The website is a direct parody of http://ricepuritytest.com
| (Warning: NSFW text)
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| There have been many "purity tests" before and after that
| one in the exact same format, that one is just perhaps the
| most well known so the author copied the format.
| oxfordmale wrote:
| Thanks for the clarification. As I didn't grow up in the
| Anglo-Saxon-speaking part of the world, it was a novel
| concept to me.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| I'd have thought that it's more likely a parody of the now
| quite dated Hacker Test (itself inspired by purity tests) that
| was making the rounds on Usenet in the late-'80 and '90s:
| http://www.mit.edu/people/nathanw/tests/hacker
| neogodless wrote:
| I've done very little with AWS for two reasons - haven't had any
| projects/work where they used it, and personally...
|
| Several years ago I signed up for a free tier account with AWS to
| play with . But I also didn't know what I was going to do with it
| - I didn't create any resources. Got distracted, a few weeks went
| by, they sent me an invoice! It wasn't for much, but it was not
| $0. I was very confused (and never figured out why I was
| charged). Fortunately I was able to reach customer service and
| get the costs dropped, and I promptly closed my account so that I
| didn't accidentally (through no action of my own) accumulate
| further charges!
|
| I'd like to see "get charged more than expected" or "think you
| were on the free tier but somehow you weren't" on this purity
| test.
|
| EDIT: OK either "free tier" was added just now or I fat-fingered
| "free" when I searched for it earlier :)
| IMSAI8080 wrote:
| The blank cheque billing is one of the reasons I don't use AWS
| for any personal project either i.e. they do not allow you to
| set a hard account cost limit. The billing approach makes AWS
| scary to learn on your own time as you don't know if you're
| going to get a huge charge from clicking some button or other
| you didn't understand properly. I deal with AWS reps for
| business and they don't seem to perceive it as a problem when I
| have mentioned it (or don't want to do anything about it).
| orf wrote:
| They don't perceive it as a problem because it's not a
| problem. You getting charged 25$ by accident is not even
| worth thinking about considering adding a meeting to discuss
| potentially adding a ticket to a jira board.
|
| If you want fixed charges use AWS amplify or another service
| built on AWS primitives. But the whole reason for using AWS
| is flexibility and "pay for what you use".
|
| If you don't understand what a button does then don't press
| it until you understand it?
| IMSAI8080 wrote:
| Flexibility and pay-as-you-go has absolutely nothing
| whatsoever to do with the capability to set an account hard
| cost limit. If AWS wanted to add such a feature they could
| do. They obviously don't for their own commercial reasons.
| It is very easy on AWS to make mistakes and it's off
| putting to people like me who do not have unlimited budgets
| as clearly you do.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| attacks are frequent, and then you gotta deal with
| waiting on aws to confirm it was an attack and refund
| etc. it's easy to avoid attacks with best practices but
| the fact stands that they are still common in customer
| accounts and then you have a financial risk on top of the
| attack risk.
| orf wrote:
| It absolutely does have everything to do with it.
|
| How would this actually work? Actually think a bit about
| how hard it would be to add a global, synchronised and
| immediate view of an accounts cost and check it on every
| single API call.
|
| Take S3 for example: you set a 1$ limit then concurrently
| upload 10 1$ per month files. What happens? Should 9 of
| those uploads fail? How would you ever synchronise that?
| Or perhaps they complete, but should the bucket delete
| the contents after the "storage cost per hour" limit is
| reached?
|
| Perhaps you could reconcile the account cost usage every
| hour, and when reached the account should be locked
| somehow and no new writes or reads can be done on
| anything. Which is basically breaking the account and
| everything that runs on it. Most people don't want that.
|
| How would it even work with bandwidth? You're serving a
| file from S3 or EC2 with your 10$ account limit. What
| happens after you use 10$ bandwidth? Should your accounts
| external internet connection be cut off? How would you
| even calculate that cost in real time at scale.
|
| Use your brain. AWS are not stupid. It's a minefield of
| complexity that would be super expensive to implement and
| that benefits nobody. The "if you mess up we will refund
| you up to 2 times" policy works absolutely fine.
| IMSAI8080 wrote:
| You're being aggressive and rude now, so I think this
| will be my last reply on this subject. As to "benefits
| nobody", that's clearly wrong. I have clearly stated what
| the issues are and other people on this thread have
| raised similar issues with AWS billing. I don't think
| you'd have to do too much googling to find more people
| with the same complaints.
|
| What they could do is pause services immediately that can
| be paused and then give you grace on services where their
| billing technology has not caught up with real time. They
| don't necessarily have to actually stop services if they
| cannot technically do it instantly, just stop charging
| you at an agreed amount. That's all that's needed.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| The saying I've seen is "never learn AWS/cloud on your own
| credit card".
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| Your score: 68
|
| The reason I don't like AWS is because billing is always at
| least like 24 hours behind. By time you realize you don't
| goofed, the bill's already probably more than you thought.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| It's because your estimated bill is calculated every night
| ctvo wrote:
| Please please please make it so labels also trigger the checkbox.
| No one has time to click your 5x5 pixel box.
| zamadatix wrote:
| <tab> + <space> ftw (and god help those on mobile).
| T00TH3M00N wrote:
| [dead]
| [deleted]
| rmbyrro wrote:
| [ ] You're anxious to click all 5x5 checkboxes on this page --
| done, you've achieved maximum AWS purity!
| csmattryder wrote:
| > Has woken up in the middle of the night to a billing alert
| email?
|
| I went through an awful period of on-call at my last place, and
| seeing "Amazon" come through on the work email shocked me awake
| thinking it's another CloudWatch alert, only to blearily see it
| was the regular end-of-month statement.
|
| You get the same feeling when you wake up before your alarm and
| you think you overslept, but now you can't get back to sleep for
| the adrenaline in the blood.
| pnathan wrote:
| when you have work and personal email on your phone
|
| and you have your own aws account
|
| and the work finance department screws up
|
| and you get an email from aws with a > 100K owed bit of
| information....
|
| that was a moment of panic.
| OnlyRepliesToBS wrote:
| [dead]
| STRML wrote:
| We have a unique one: back before the z1d launched, we had a
| critical system that was _very_ single-threaded and its
| performance drove revenue in an extremely direct way.
|
| So we were, deep in the shit, fighting fires due to our systems
| being in a perpetual state of DoS, and we asked if they would
| rack a machine with a certain overclocked Skylake chip in it. We
| offered 7 figures to do it. It was worth that much to us to get
| ~40% more capacity without having to migrate off AWS. They said
| no :)
| sjducb wrote:
| I got 76, I have no idea how good/bad that is.
|
| You could put a histogram of the results and show where the
| player is on the histogram.
| [deleted]
| azurezyq wrote:
| Add one: Got to know that cross AZ traffic is double charged (OUT
| and IN), making it twice as expensive as GCP.
| StratusBen wrote:
| As someone who has spent the greater part of the last 3 years
| working on AWS UX or billing related things....this hits
| incredibly too close to home.
|
| Also, for anyone waking up in the middle of the night on billing
| alert emails, this is why a lot of folks are using
| https://www.vantage.sh/
| tuankiet65 wrote:
| Needs one where you tried to scale up before realizing you had to
| up your quota.
| dekhn wrote:
| I'm disappointed there wasn't a specific entry for "sat on a
| beach in Hawaii on Christmas vacation having a 3-way email with
| the CEO of my startup (who is sitting on a beach in Tahiti) and
| an AWS contract person to finalize the signing of a 3-year multi-
| million dollar contract". That's what I did.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Once you click "Calculate My Score" there is no way to go back to
| the test. There is no back button, and not links on screen.
| upon_drumhead wrote:
| > Complained about an AWS region going down more than your S/O?
|
| We (society) really need to move beyond making these lame jokes.
| They weren't funny in the 80's, 90's, 00's, or the 10's...
| mparkhurst wrote:
| Fair point, fixed. We took inspiration from the original Rice
| Purity Test, which is very NSFW, but missed the mark on this.
| wereallterrrist wrote:
| Just read it as "my S/O loves going down on me and AWS still
| beats them". Makes it less boomery/whiney to me anyway
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| People liking their genitals licked is older than the 1980s,
| and isn't going away.
| Idk__Throwaway wrote:
| Society doesn't need to change just because you don't like this
| specific sub-genre of joke. Romantic partnership, and
| subsequent occasional annoyance with said partner, is an almost
| universally shared human experience.
| scubbo wrote:
| a) you are (wrongly) assuming that this one person is the
| only person who dislikes this type of joke. You could make
| this same (wrong) argument to discount literally any
| suggestion or criticism - "you are the only person who feels
| this way, therefore no".
|
| b) just because something is common or widespread, doesn't
| mean it should be normalized or treated as "the best that it
| can be". That's a highly conservative (in the non-US-
| political sense) and neophobic viewpoint - not what I would
| expect on Hacker News. Reduction of a S/O to a sex-provider
| might be common among certain social groups, but that's not
| the society I dream of.
| LawTalkingGuy wrote:
| > Reduction of a S/O to a sex-provider
|
| Nothing in the joke said "only". By that logic, all single
| sentences are reductionist.
|
| You're intentionally using emotionally laden words.
|
| Also, the difference between a BFF and an significant other
| generally _is_ the sex.
|
| > you are (wrongly) assuming that this one person is the
| only person who dislikes this type of joke
|
| Making everyone happy isn't possible and it's generally not
| even worth trying because some people just dislike
| everything. If they're overly dramatic about the "harm" it
| usually means there isn't any, that they just like
| controlling discussion.
|
| > just because something is common or widespread, doesn't
| mean it should be normalized or treated as "the best that
| it can be"
|
| Nobody did that. They said that in a sense of "and yet
| you're not dead yet."
|
| Generally humor like this is only bad if it unreasonably
| hurts someone and "all SOs" are not a class who can be hurt
| by humor. Nobody is being maligned.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| Maybe we should consider the context before we crack a joke.
| dsr_ wrote:
| Huh. I had read it as "Complained about an AWS region going
| down more than your S/O [complains about an AWS region going
| down]".
|
| Read your way, yeah, it's inappropriate for a work context.
| QuinnyPig wrote:
| OOF. Yeah, I read it your way and completely missed the
| shitty sex joke. Rethinking promoting this one to my audience
| next week...
| mparkhurst wrote:
| Good point. Our intentions were to keep this shareable and
| appropriate within a work context. We took inspiration from
| the original rice purity test, which is very NSFW - but
| missed the mark on this question. Fixed
| itsyaboi wrote:
| I read it as "Both you and your S/O are complaining about an
| AWS region going down but you happen to complain more".
| nerdchum wrote:
| What are your thoughts on Dave Chappelle and Joe Rogan?
| arsome wrote:
| Oh come on, that one is gender neutral even!
| scubbo wrote:
| Being a good person doesn't simply mean "avoiding whatever
| linguistic pitfalls the boogeyman SJWs have thrown in your
| way" - it means actually thinking about the impact and
| implication of your words and actions, even when there isn't
| a convenient buzzword-criticism that could be applied to
| them.
| bool3max wrote:
| Plenty of people find them funny. Stop being senstive for no
| reason.
| dark-star wrote:
| I remember back in the 90s lots of these purity tests circulated
| on AOL and elsewhere on the 'net.
|
| I thknk there was at least a "geek purity test" and a "programmer
| purity test".. and maybe a "UNIX purity test"? Not sure. They
| were all quite funny though (at least my younger self thought so)
| ok123456 wrote:
| I'd rather be in control of my product and deployments rather
| than deal with all this nonsense.
| Spivak wrote:
| On-prem gal turned AWS because people don't hire you without
| cloud. It's not as bad as I had assumed. It sure is a lot of
| bullshit but no different than working on-prem, just different
| kinds of bullshit.
|
| Like how-fucking-dare RDS use DNS for failover instead of ARP
| so it's impossible to do instant non-user-visible recovery.
| devin wrote:
| Is this a clever advertisement for antimetal.com? I'd never heard
| of it.
| notamy wrote:
| Oh, so it is. I completely missed that in my first pass over
| this >_< Not affiliated with them at all.
| harrylucas wrote:
| Yeah instantly my thought. Also since it's only in "request
| access" mode it's not something that can be ticked off eg not
| really apart of the list. Also the landing page for it feels
| like it's written in the same style.
|
| Definitely not against advertising the product but make it more
| explicit
| devin wrote:
| If the author(s) of this website are reading: The LinkedIn info
| I found about you was all Web3-related. If you're actually
| going after people looking to reduce their AWS costs, you may
| want to fix that.
| QuinnyPig wrote:
| Yes.
|
| That said, I'm vaguely amused at the concept (I got a 23), but
| they also misspelled my name (Corey) and the name of the
| newsletter (Last Week in AWS, not "This Week").
|
| I also have some quibbles about a few of the questions, but
| that's probably no surprise...
| apnew wrote:
| Corey, just wanted to let you know I really appreciate your
| work. You have been a great source of knowledge over past few
| years.
| brazzledazzle wrote:
| Would also like to affirm that same sentiment.
| QuinnyPig wrote:
| That is incredibly kind of both of you; thanks! I don't
| hear that nearly as often as most people suspect I do...
| Corrado wrote:
| Ditto! I read very few emails/blogs, but I always read
| through "Last Week In AWS" fully. I even have the t-shirt!
| gumby271 wrote:
| > Uses AWS console in dark mode?
|
| I'm sorry, there's a dark mode for the console!?
| burkaman wrote:
| Just introduced in October.
|
| https://{region}.console.aws.amazon.com/settings/home?region...
| dexterdog wrote:
| Not sure why you should get points for toggling a config. The
| points should be for not using the console.
| latchkey wrote:
| A play on the original:
|
| http://ricepuritytest.com/
| rodface wrote:
| Were we (Rice U) really the original? :)
| shagie wrote:
| My first thought was "surely the hacker purity test predates
| that" ... and then I did a little bit of searching. The Hacker
| Purity Test is from '89...
| http://www.armory.com/tests/hacker.html
|
| But it turns out that the Rice Purity Test will be celebrating
| its 100th anniversary next year.
| https://lhsepic.com/6806/opinion/3_op_ricepuritypranavm/
|
| > The Rice Purity Test is a survey first administered by Rice
| University in 1924. The test asks 100 yes-or-no questions to
| output a numerical score, with 100 being the "most pure" and 0
| being completely "impure." The first test was given only to
| women in order for Rice to gauge how risque their female
| population was. It often resulted in shaming: women with scores
| below 70 were often viewed as immoral, whereas those with
| scores above 90 were seen as uptight. The test has since become
| popular worldwide, despite retaining its most fundamental
| problem: it reduces test-takers' complex experiences to a
| single numerical value.
| latchkey wrote:
| Correct. I did the same search before I posted it. =)
|
| Side note, I remember finding one of the dirtier purity tests
| on usenet after I got onto the internet in `91. Just being
| fresh in college at that point, a few of the terms used were
| new to me. hahahahah.
| mushiii123 wrote:
| What about innocence test https://innocencetest.net/
| an-allen wrote:
| Ah that's freaking great. I remember taking the purity test
| when I matriculated to Rice (decades ago). I remember having
| one of the lower scores amongst the good folk, but not obscene.
| Something like maybe a 50 or so... always good to see how one
| is progressing on their goals.
|
| Click click click... ouch an 18.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| Can we have one of these for Azure?
| KingMachiavelli wrote:
| Am I the only one that likes the AWS console interface UI? My
| only complaint is that some features/products don't really have a
| UI or require you to manually create the internal IAM role before
| you can use it.
|
| IMO it's a better UI than O365/Azure and I don't have much
| experience with Gcloud to say much but they seem about equal but
| still leaning towards AWS as the best UI of the top 3 cloud
| providers.
| antihero wrote:
| Surely the console is only for experimentation and checking on
| things? I figured anything proper should be done in a
| reproducible way (IaaC like Terraform/CDK/CF)
| jnsaff2 wrote:
| Azure web ui developers are actually proud of their claim that
| it is in their opinion the largest SPA in the world.
|
| If that is your comparison then AWS Console is amazing.
|
| In general tho, AWS Console is OK at best, it does the job and
| for some services it is actually good. Many services are awful
| tho.
| sylens wrote:
| I've come to much prefer GCP's interface
| philpot1 wrote:
| I got a 64, but the UI on this site is reflective of the AWS UI.
| But very cool idea
| keepquestioning wrote:
| [dead]
| aflukasz wrote:
| 86
|
| Random reflection: Key to AWS costs is to always assume every
| compute, storage or networking unit incurs cost. Always.
|
| Then got to (a) pricing of the service in question, (b) FAQ of
| the service, (c) pricing and FAQ for EC2 specifically and scan
| for every pricing information you can.
|
| If after that you can be 100% sure something does not incur cost,
| only then you are allowed to remove it from your financial model
| of what you want to deploy.
|
| You do have a financial model, right?
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| 89 here. Less of an engineer and more LucidChart drawing
| architect though.
| nmandvi wrote:
| 96 here...lol
| mattficke wrote:
| > Has complained about the AWS UI at a party?
|
| Good to know it's not just me (but seriously, the way they've
| implemented search in paginated results is the most actively
| hostile UX decision I've ever encountered. It's so bad it almost
| makes me feel better about the half-baked hacky stuff I've done
| over the years.)
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| I will offer a very tepid "I've seen worse" for AWS's UI
| considering all the things it has to support.
|
| That said, the redesign made it worse (those scroll windows
| that don't fill up the pane... MY GOD HOW DO YOU NOT FIX THAT),
| there is no sense of continual improvement and addition of
| useful new features and views, performance is pretty bad.
|
| All I ever hear "you're not supposed to use the UI, you're
| supposed to use the API".
|
| Don't get me started on the API.
|
| This quiz is missing these three key points:
|
| - has culled 1,000$ annual savings in a AWS cost saving review?
|
| - has culled 10,000$ annual savings in an AWS cost saving
| review?
|
| - has culled 100,000$ ?
|
| - has culled 1,000,000$?
|
| I ... almost .. got to 1,000,000 once.
|
| - trapped AWS support in an outright lie?
|
| - gotten AWS support to tell you results of hidden internal
| metrics to debug something?
| somethingAlex wrote:
| Yeah I'm always surprised by the downright hate. I use the
| console for 95% of things and it's alright.
|
| My gripe is that the thing just gives off this BLOATED
| impression. Safari routinely reloads it because it was "using
| significant energy." Every time I load a page I just wait
| until it renders, goes blank, re-renders, goes blank, places
| everything that was on the left over to the right, and then
| finally things settle down and I click a button. That all
| takes about 1.5s though, so not awful.
| jackson1442 wrote:
| > Don't get me started on the API.
|
| At least it's not the GCP API. Had to use that for some
| compliance automation once and still have nightmares about
| it.
| kccqzy wrote:
| Why not use the CLI though? The aws and gcloud CLI tools
| seem fine when I occasionally use them.
| ahtihn wrote:
| CLIs are not great at showing you the operations that are
| available to you. Exploring what's possible is much
| easier with a GUI in my experience.
| jackson1442 wrote:
| Ah, read API as CLI (with AWS they're essentially the
| same).
|
| The biggest problem with GCP's api/cli/sdk/console is
| they're not the same. There are things you can only do in
| the console, or have different grammars across CLI/SDK,
| or have different permission schemes across them. Add to
| that the intermixing of "IT Admin" and "Cloud Admin"
| roles due to all of your Google Groups also being IAM
| groups, and IAM being somehow tied into your G Suite
| admin area, it's just a confusing mess.
|
| With AWS, the CLI is the API is the SDK. So if you can
| use one, you can use all of them very easily.
| scarface74 wrote:
| It's all based on the same specification and all of the
| SDKs and the CLI are autogenerated.
| musha68k wrote:
| Their UI is the biggest contributing factor for the continued
| success of Terraform.
| messe wrote:
| > Good to know it's not just me
|
| It's certainly not just you. I've complained about it at work
| parties _at AWS_ , and so did my colleagues.
|
| I was on a front end team working on the AWS Console for a
| fairly well known service.
| philsnow wrote:
| > the way they've implemented search in paginated results is
| the most actively hostile UX decision I've ever encountered
|
| Who is the "they" in that sentence? Each AWS product team
| writes their own console UI, as far as I know, and they're free
| to do pagination however it makes sense for them.
|
| (Of course my question doesn't really matter because they're
| all pretty middling.)
| mattficke wrote:
| I don't know but the behavior seems consistent across
| services. When there are multiple pages of results for
| something (running ECS services, whatever) if you filter the
| results it doesn't coalesce the results, you have to just
| keep clicking through multiple empty pages, sometimes dozens
| of times, before finding a result that matches the filter, or
| even know if anything matches.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Most of the underlying APIs don't have any concept of
| filters and most do pagination and will only return a
| maximum of 50 results. Given those limitations, it's the
| best you can do on the UI.
| ahtihn wrote:
| They're in control of the API, so it's still a ridiculous
| excuse.
|
| And even if they can't change the API, the front-end
| could request the next page from the API until they have
| a full page to display.
| hansvm wrote:
| While we're joking about AWS adventures, has anyone here
| seriously contemplated using S3 keys as a cheap blob store? It
| looks like they're a generous kilobyte a pop, and prefix queries
| are supported, so you could hypothetically chunk your data into a
| [key|index|data_index| scheme and store a bunch of empty files in
| slightly under 1KB chunks -- ingress is nearly free (API calls,
| though you can batch them to keep this from being terrible),
| egress is expensive, and storage is free. Does that work?
| csunbird wrote:
| That is why you also pay per request :)
| berkle4455 wrote:
| This is a terrible idea. S3 charges $0.005 per 1,000 PUT
| operations. So let's say you want to store 1GB (1e9 bytes)
| 1,000 bytes at a time, that's 1,000,000 keys.
|
| $0.005 * (1,000,000 PUT operations / 1,000) = $5.00 to write
| 1GB. The on-going storage cost I believe would be free since
| the files themselves are empty.
|
| Meanwhile writing a single 1GB file to S3? Costs you $0.023 per
| month storage, and the single write cost is $0.000005. It'll
| take 217 months to cost $5.00
| hansvm wrote:
| Isn't that partially mitigated via S3 Batch?
| berkle4455 wrote:
| Not to my knowledge? Can you link me to the S3 Batch
| documentation around PUT'ing multiple files from an
| external source onto S3?
| scarface74 wrote:
| Trivia: this API is I believe the only documented time that
| AWS has ever raised prices. It was done just for that reason.
| dexterdog wrote:
| If you track the extortion that AWS charges for egress
| bandwidth against both inflation and what bandwidth costs
| on average then they are always raising that rate.
| dexterdog wrote:
| Is it cheaper than just using route53?
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-01-27 23:02 UTC)