AWS Purity Test

https://www.awspuritytest.com/

by notamy • 3 years ago

134 110 3 years ago

neogodless• 3 years ago

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 :)

hotpotamus• 3 years ago

The saying I've seen is "never learn AWS/cloud on your own credit card".

anakaine• 3 years ago

I'll second this. It's fantastic advice.

WrtCdEvrydy• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

It’s because your estimated bill is calculated every night

IMSAI80803• 3 years ago

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).

orf3• 3 years ago

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?

devin2• 3 years ago

Is this a clever advertisement for antimetal.com? I'd never heard of it.

harrylucas• 3 years ago

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

QuinnyPig4• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

Corey, just wanted to let you know I really appreciate your work. You have been a great source of knowledge over past few years.

notamy• 3 years ago

Oh, so it is. I completely missed that in my first pass over this >_< Not affiliated with them at all.

devin2• 3 years ago

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.

latchkey2• 3 years ago

A play on the original:

http://ricepuritytest.com/

shagie• 3 years ago

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 risqué 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.

latchkey2• 3 years ago

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.

rodface• 3 years ago

Were we (Rice U) really the original? :)

an-allen• 3 years ago

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.

mattficke2• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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?

jackson14422• 3 years ago

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.

somethingAlex• 3 years ago

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.

musha68k• 3 years ago

Their UI is the biggest contributing factor for the continued success of Terraform.

philsnow• 3 years ago

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.)

mattficke2• 3 years ago

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.

messe• 3 years ago

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.

csmattryder• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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.

StratusBen• 3 years ago

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/

dekhn• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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…

SV_BubbleTime• 3 years ago

People liking their genitals licked is older than the 1980s, and isn't going away.

Idk__Throwaway• 3 years ago

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.

PartiallyTyped• 3 years ago

Maybe we should consider the context before we crack a joke.

scubbo2• 3 years ago

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.

nerdchum• 3 years ago

What are your thoughts on Dave Chappelle and Joe Rogan?

arsome• 3 years ago

Oh come on, that one is gender neutral even!

scubbo2• 3 years ago

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.

wereallterrrist• 3 years ago

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

itsyaboi• 3 years ago

I read it as "Both you and your S/O are complaining about an AWS region going down but you happen to complain more".

dsr_• 3 years ago

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.

QuinnyPig4• 3 years ago

OOF. Yeah, I read it your way and completely missed the shitty sex joke. Rethinking promoting this one to my audience next week...

mparkhurst2• 3 years ago

Fair point, fixed. We took inspiration from the original Rice Purity Test, which is very NSFW, but missed the mark on this.

bool3max• 3 years ago

Plenty of people find them funny. Stop being senstive for no reason.

dark-star• 3 years ago

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)

gumby271• 3 years ago

Uses AWS console in dark mode?

I'm sorry, there's a dark mode for the console!?

burkaman• 3 years ago

Just introduced in October.

https://{region}.console.aws.amazon.com/settings/home?region...

dexterdog4• 3 years ago

Not sure why you should get points for toggling a config. The points should be for not using the console.

hansvm2• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

That is why you also pay per request :)

berkle44552• 3 years ago

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

scarface744• 3 years ago

Trivia: this API is I believe the only documented time that AWS has ever raised prices. It was done just for that reason.

hansvm2• 3 years ago

Isn't that partially mitigated via S3 Batch?

dexterdog4• 3 years ago

Is it cheaper than just using route53?

jwestbury• 3 years ago

Having worked at AWS for about half a decade in the past, I can guarantee that if you've thought of a way to abuse^W leverage their services for alternative purposes, someone has thought of it internally, as well. I knew someone back in 2014 who was working on a project to build a data store on tags, since tags were free. (The reality is that the tagging infrastructure would never have supported this kind of large-scale use, though. I remember a customer who was applying multiple unique tags to every single EC2 instance they launched, and by the time they had launched hundreds of thousands of instances, they were seeing very real latency when interacting with tags. I think the underlying performance issue was resolved, but these sorts of gotchas are all over the place.)

ctvo• 3 years ago

Please please please make it so labels also trigger the checkbox. No one has time to click your 5x5 pixel box.

zamadatix• 3 years ago

<tab> + <space> ftw (and god help those on mobile).

rmbyrro• 3 years ago

[ ] You're anxious to click all 5x5 checkboxes on this page -- done, you've achieved maximum AWS purity!

ok123456• 3 years ago

I'd rather be in control of my product and deployments rather than deal with all this nonsense.

Spivak• 3 years ago

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.

firesteelrain• 3 years ago

Can we have one of these for Azure?

oxfordmale2• 3 years ago

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.

hn_throwaway_992• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

The website is a direct parody of http://ricepuritytest.com (Warning: NSFW text)

oxfordmale2• 3 years ago

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.

rconti• 3 years ago

I'm just impressed kids these days are keeping it alive

ThrowawayR2• 3 years ago

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

azurezyq2• 3 years ago

Add one: Got to know that cross AZ traffic is double charged (OUT and IN), making it twice as expensive as GCP.

willthames• 3 years ago

Cross AZ traffic became free in April last year

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2022/04/aws-data-...

azurezyq2• 3 years ago

That's for private link. Direct transfers in the same VPC are still $0.02/GB (in+out). Privatelink has to be used together with an LB, which is not free (hourly+byte processed)

tuankiet65• 3 years ago

Needs one where you tried to scale up before realizing you had to up your quota.

KingMachiavelli• 3 years ago

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.

sylens• 3 years ago

I've come to much prefer GCP's interface

antihero• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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.

rurp• 3 years ago

OMG, as bad as the AWS console is, Azure is much worse. The convoluted interface is bad enough, but the SPA warts make it even worse. Not supporting basic browser functionality like tabs is awful.

brightball• 3 years ago

Got Covid at re:Invent

I'm a little bummed there wasn't a "didn't get covid at re:Invent" option...

dexterdog4• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

I got a 94. :/

sjducb• 3 years ago

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.

ChicagoDave• 3 years ago

89 here. Less of an engineer and more LucidChart drawing architect though.

nmandvi• 3 years ago

96 here...lol

philpot1• 3 years ago

I got a 64, but the UI on this site is reflective of the AWS UI. But very cool idea

STRML• 3 years ago

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 :)

aflukasz• 3 years ago

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?

alephu5• 3 years ago

I got a 96 and am pleased with that. I have serious concerns about Amazon as a company, they're too big and predatory.

I've been using AWS at various companies and have tried to embrace its paradigms but I hate them.

AWS Purity Test

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