Hello, today I'm gonna tell you a story about my experience with Amazon Web Services.

I started using it not so long time ago. What is AWS? Amazon provides on-demand cloud computing platform. VM instances, databases, load balancers, and more. And it's so cool 😁

So if you create an account for the first time you have the ability of 12 months "free" using several AWS services. This thing is called Free Tier and restricts the use of certain services. For example, the using of EC2 (virtual machines) service is limited to 750 hours. You will not be charged for 750 hours of using your VM and that's it.

Unfortunately, there's is a thing I didn't know about when using EC2.

Standard vs Unlimited

If you create an EC2 instance of t2 or t3 type, then there is a thing enabled by default which called unlimited feature. And it's bad in my case 💩

Ok, let's figure it out. Every EC2 VM has its own bound of CPU utilization called baseline. Imagine, you are using a VM for heavy tasks when the CPU is loaded above baseline, even at 100%. In that case (if you have unlimited feature enabled), you'll pay money for extra CPU utilization.

But... If you have standard feature enabled, then your CPU utilization will not exceeds baseline bound. Meanwhile, if the CPU frequency rises above the baseline, it will immediately be reduced - great, because there is no additional cost.

Unfortunately, I didn't know that and paid almost 9 dollars. Despite the fact that I currently used only 552 hours of 750 free and the average workload per month.., attention, is zero. I don't know how the costs is computed on AWS 😆 I don't know why they charged me $9. But the money was refunded to me. Thanks to Melanie from AWS tech support ♥️.

Thoughts

When creating VMs in EC2 - please, disable unlimited feature if you really don't need it enabled.

EC2 -> Instances -> Actions -> Instance Settings -> Change T2/T3 Unlimited -> Disable

That's it. Hope it helps someone of you 😉 Stay awesome! Thanks!