I Followed the Official AWS Amplify Guide and Was Charged $1,100

Par for the course for AWS. I tried following their quickstart Sagemaker guide to run Llama 2 a few months back. And it certainly spins up quick, but next day I realize it's running me $400/day.

I was able to get the charges reversed, but definitely learned not to trust their guides.

Bug: Guide charged the user $400/day

Status: Won't fix (working as intended)

Notes: Got the author promoted to SDE III for great impact and revenue boost

Sagemaker is one of the biggest bummers in terms of product and is a clear case of enshittification.

When the product was starting (2017/2018) the whole setup was quite straightforward: Notebook instances, Inferences, REST APIs for servicing. Some EFS on top and clear that the service centered around S3. And of course, closed price without any surprises.

Was a kind Digital Ocean vibe the whole experience, and a Data Scientist with a rudimentary knowledge and curiosity around infrastructure could setup something affordable, predictable, and simple.

Today we have Wrangler, Feature Store, and RStudio, the console for the notebooks has an awful UX, and several services are under the hood moving data around (and billing for that).

Feature request: Write more guides that charge the user $400/day for a toy example.