Mildly Infuriating

Azure (number 2 in the industry I think?) has budget kill switches.

This gives me flashbacks (traumas?) of a past job where I need to run AWS services to host an online media event. After it concluded and we were shutting things down, we kept getting invoices. Find the obscure menu option for one of the services that was still running, each service having its own interface and unique ways of making it extremely obscure.

I remember some services didn't even have a way of technically shutting it down, just an option to unassign instances. Only then was it possible to set the number of instances to zero, but you had to do it for like 15 regions individually. I honestly can't remember the details, but it left such a sour taste in my mouth that I swore to never use AWS again.

Before the cloud it was so hard to get a budget for anything, even necessary yearly upgrades. Sometimes I would have to scrap the least important server when a component in a more important one died. Then the cloud came along and suddenly we had so much money to spend! But now it was so hard to track who spent it, what projects it was spent on, and how we could dial it down. SMH. Cloud computing can be so ridiculous.

Agreed, AWS make pricing deliberately difficult to control.

Check out budget actions, you can set that to stop EC2s on certain thresholds. Not perfects but can help. Also if you can use parameter store instead of secrets manager, you can save a bunch of money there too.

I only decided to set up a personal AWS for some minor things after having worked on it at employers for many years, after watching employers accidentally spend $3000 a day or $1 million a month or $35,000 in error. Cloud is the devil, bring back servers. One flat piece of hardware you can do whatever with...but even that's not sacred. If you use hosted servers, the hosts often still charge for ingress/egress and other things now, so you still fall into traps if not careful. Simpler though.

So I guess, storing your own server in your office is the way to go, but then the ISP issues...

Let us all just go back to paper, actually.

Biggest companies in the world still need to pickpocket their customers and that's somehow okay

While small to medium hosters are usually okay.

it feels like the setup menus are just a game of minesweeper

..and that turns it into a skills game vs a bad gamble.

And people who don't wanna hire pros to manage their on-prem think they can maybe, just maybe, win that skill game.

And that's how casinos that don't launder their games of chance through clowd sign-ups also leverage dunning-kruger for profit.

It's a tale as old as software development itself: Fuck around with your license, find out by getting replaced by a fork.

Although Redis came back and reversed the relicensing one year later lol:

https://dirkriehle.com/2025/05/03/re-relicensing-to-open-source-explained/

Often those sites randomly generate ids and classes, so it will work only once.

Change to -2 if possible