I want to be excited about this, but amazon basically destroyed any trust I had in them (at least the people that handle AWS). I signed up for the amazon free usage tier of AWS, excited to try it out, and really really loving amazon for doing something like that (giving away service for free).

I signed up, spun up an EC2 instance (careful to make sure that this really was free), checked it out for a few minutes, then moved back to my linode and slicehost boxen. I was excited to have another spare machine to try stuff out on for the next year (I really wanted to try nginx as a reverse proxy).

About a month later, I got a bill for $60 from amazon. I tried to find a support chat for AWS (like what slicehost has), but couldn't...tried to find a way of calling them...but couldn't. Finally I sent them some sort of feedback saying "Hey, was this a mistake? Why are you billing me for something that is free?"

The response that I got back was something like "The cost for AWS is $60/mo! Thanks for using AWS!"

To me, this is absurd, and is borderline fraudulent (although I'm sure it was a mistake). Luckily for me, I have a good job, and while eating $60 worth of amazon making a mistake is annoying, it isn't a catastrophe. This wouldn't have been true for me while I was in school though, and wouldn't be true for some of the friends I recommended give AWS a try.

I'm starting to think that stuff like this is where "the cloud" falls apart on people. If I have a problem with my Verizon Business internet, I can call them and talk to somebody until it's fixed. If I have a problem with one of our AT&T telephones, same thing. If the power goes out at our building, I can call down to APS and find out why.

From what I can gather, this absolutely isn't true for google, or amazon, or any of the other "cloud" providers. If I build an email system myself, buy bandwidth/power/rackspace from a colo myself, and manage it myself, there aren't going to be any surprises. If it goes down, I can just look at why. Nobody is going to surprise me with a bill (except maybe the colo).

To be honest, amazon, I don't even plan on building anything on your platform...ever. Same goes for you, google. While I really really love the idea of cloud computering (or elastic computering), I definitely don't love the idea of some faceless company with no customer service of any kind who can arbitrarily just take money from me and doesn't care if I leave.

To me, stuff like this is a massive step backwards.

While not related to AWS, but more "the cloud" in general...look at what happened a few months ago when facebook's OAuth system bailed out for a few hours. Anybody dependent on facebook for login handling was simply SoL without really anything that they could do to solve the problem until facebook fixed it.

How is this desirable?

There was an article here yesterday (an it seems like something like this pops up just about every week) about how the days of the system admin are over. I wouldn't be so sure. You can yell at system admins until you feel better, you can call them endlessly at 3:00am until they wake up, you can tell them that they have to come in to the office RIGHT NOW and fix it RIGHT NOW. (I'm a sys admin, btw)

You can't do this to amazon, you can't do this to google. If amazon email service bails out...sorry, but call back later and maybe it will be fixed.