Thread by @mouthofmorrison

I’ve told this story in private a few times but it’s time to tell it publicly.

How I Got a Lifetime Ban from AWS: A Cautionary Tale for Idiots on Computers

(Illustrated with Larry David GIFs)

The year was 2015, and I had just quit my first job out of college after less than a year. Not exactly the roaring start to my adult life I had hoped for.

I was pretty broke. But I had prospects—May of that year I got a job at @azavea and things were looking up!

Just one problem: I couldn’t renew my car registration because it failed inspection (the brakes were shot). I needed to pay $300+ bucks to get the brakes replaced, but I didn’t have the cash.

Normally, this wouldn’t be a huge deal. But there was a catch...

I was also getting ticketed $35 every other day by the same PPA person who would methodically track my car down and ticket me. My burn rate was ~$525/month in tickets alone and I had no cash to pay them, let alone fix the brakes. Pay day was still a few weeks away.

This vicious cycle of being broke, getting tickets and not being able to afford to fix it was causing me a fair bit of anxiety. So as the bills piled up, I started researching to see if I could hide my car...in plain sight. Somewhere it wouldn’t get ticketed.

I found my golden ticket—an open dataset of every parking ticket ever handed out in Philly going back years. It had millions of entries. I figured if I could plot them on a map, I could find blank spots where I could park my car but not incur tickets! opendataphilly.org/dataset/parkin…

Best part was—my new job was at a geospatial analysis company. This was my side project to get up to speed on why our work was valuable.

One issue—I couldn’t open a 6 million row .csv on my laptop because it crashed my desktop GIS software. I needed more juice.

How does this relate to AWS? I’m getting there, relax!

At my new job, I sat next to this quiet engineer @hectcastro whose desk seemed like air traffic control. Once an hour some other engineer would stop by to ask for help. I was like, “who is this guy?” Turns out he led the ops team. Still does. Now he’s VP of Engineering. Props.

I realized pretty quickly that whatever Hector was up to was EXTREMELY valuable—all these brilliant engineers went to HIM for help. I decided I wanted to learn how to do what Hector did, and then it dawned on me: maybe I can use AWS to open this massive .csv...

Now I’m talking about 1. Solving my problem 2. Learning about my new field and 3. Gaining valuable skills. This...this was a good idea. I created an AWS account that very night and logged in. First thing I did—make sure there was a free tier. There was!

I clicked a few buttons, tried to upload the .csv, and quickly realized I was WAY out of my depth. I was never gonna be an ops engineer...and that was the end of that. Or so I thought...

A few months later, on a Sunday while walking around Philly with my girlfriend (now wife!), I got an alert on my phone. My bank account was overdrawn. Like, by a couple thousand bucks.

How?! I had paid for the new brakes, passed inspection, and stopped the bleeding. I still had a mountain of tickets to pay off but I was making progress...what happened?

I logged into my bank account and then I saw it...a HUGE AWS withdrawal.

I furiously logged into AWS to figure out what had happened. Somehow I had reserved an enormous EC2 instance and it had been running 24/7 for months on end, wracking up a huge bill. I was stunned. Stupefied. Gobsmacked. I’d really done it now.

So, I did the only think I could think of and I called the support line. It was a Sunday, so I was on hold for an agonizingly long time. Eventually I got someone and told them straight up—I’m an idiot and incurred a few thousand dollars in charges trying to open a .csv...

They were super nice but made it clear—this was something they needed to run up the chain. They didn’t really sound optimistic; honestly they sounded a bit afraid. I think we both felt bad for each other.

The next day, I got a call. It was from a supervisor. He told me he had news—they had decided to refund all of the charges.

Just one condition: I needed to promise never to open an AWS account ever again.

I said, “...deal.”

And that’s how I got a lifetime ban from AWS.