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Comment by sgtnoodle | Hacker News Reader

I have access to a button that I can trivially press, that a coworker recently told me generates a $50 AWS bill.

There's various levels of foot-gun clicks that can generate AWS bills many orders of magnitude larger.

Reserved Instances are a really quick and easy way to blow a few million with one click.

Europe (Frankfurt), 3 year, all-upfront, Windows w/ SQL Enterprise, Dedicated Tenancy, u-12tb1.112xlarge instance at $5,926,378 up-front.

The discounted $225/hour rate for it disappears into the background noise.

(No, I'm not willing to test it to find out if it actually works)

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/reserved-instances/pricin...

You can increase it to $6,070,809.96 by not paying upfront, or an order of magnitude more by just buying it on-demand and not checking your bill for 3 years (not recommended).

My comment was more about the 1-click-major-spend aspect. You can always terminate a normal instance - refunding a RI purchase is going to require a lot more explanation and dealing with support/finance/lawyers.

Wow! I was trying to find those numbers and the highest I could get to was ~899k. Then I switched to the OS to Windows from Linux. That licensing fee is wild!

OS Licensing is crazy. Last month I was telling a customer that they should just change their Qlikview system to something else just to avoid paying 25% of their bill to Microsoft.

for that price, you probably can buy 3 equivalent machines, a consulting shop to setup redundancy (this thing isn't!), install a living cabin to your colo and have someone sitting there on watch 24/7...

(should have read the licensing issue - still you can buy 2 and the consultant)

Haha, when I worked at a small IaaS, half my time on support rota was explaining how the SQL Server instance a customer launched was costing so much.

Recursive lambda function call?

It's actually pretty cool, and the evolution of a piece of software I barfed out about 5 years ago. It's a CI job that deterministically runs thousands of simulated flights of an autonomous airplane, across a wide variety of interesting scenarios.

I’m having the same conversations with people but from the opposite side: I’d far, far prefer you click the $50 button than do anything at all in the real world, because anytime anyone at my work touches anything that isn’t a keyboard, it’s costing us a hell of a lot more than that.

Indeed. The whole point of CI and simulation is to reduce significantly more expensive manual testing.

A couple months ago, folk were grumbling about a non-deterministic failure in the main build CI plan, for the N'th time without attempting to do anything about it. So, I proceeded to queue up dozens of jobs at a time, every 15 minutes for several hours, until I had several failures worth of interesting logs. I also had the interest of several other software teams, wondering why the entire CI pipeline was clogged up.

It turned out someone years ago had written a cron job that would asynchronously delete every file on the build server older than a week, every hour on the hour. At some point some build artifacts got added that came from a cached copy on a remote server rather than locally built, and their modification timestamps were preserved. Any jobs that happened to be running while on the hour would have those files mysteriously disappear without a trace. Oops!

Is the flight simulation code open source?

No it is not, but you could take a look at airsim or gazebo.

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