Ask HN: Best ways to eval cloud providers | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Best ways to eval cloud providers

3 pointsAtlasBarfed4 comments

I have a nascent OSS project that helps deal with cloud infrastructure and want to test it on the free tiers of many cloud providers.

Unsurprisingly, the cloud providers only provide partial tooling to limit charges, and they are pretty cloud-specific.

One of the big sticking points is the credit card. I don't want to use my main credit cards / sources, I'd like to use a dedicated one with a low limit that will start rejecting charges quickly.

The "preloaded" cards are targeted at lower incomes with tons of predatory policies like decreasing balances and fees, and might not even be accepted by the providers. I wanted one of those for carrying around emergency money but couldn't find a single one that was intolerably predatory.

Otherwise any tools or "code zoos" for this specific task?

Anyone have any other tips around structuring your accounts for the clouds that will help lock them?

> I'd like to use a dedicated one with a low limit that will start rejecting charges quickly.

You are aware that if you were legitimately billed for overages that you didn't catch, you are still liable for them, even if your cards refuse the transaction with insufficient funds, correct?

Let's take this case: I don't want to be billed anything and I didn't upload my root creds to github for hackers.

But I still don't read all the fine print and start getting charged. It hits 100$ and my limit is 100$. Amazon starts complaining.

I guess I'm hoping a low limit would cause Amazon to start complaining and throttle/restrict.

Yes it's not perfect, it would be better to tell Amazon to never bill and not let me use anything that costs money. Which they won't do, for revenue enhancement reasons.

There's like 7000 credit card issuers (maybe more), if you want one card per cloud, just open a bunch of cards and ask for low limits. Write on the card the name of the cloud you intend to use it with.

You should consider using a cloud provider with no surprise billing or even prepay it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com