Weekly Journal 159 - Rants

AWS Billing

AWS continues to make changes that are designed to extract more money from customer’s wallets. Their latest move is to charge a fee for all IPv4 Elastic IPs. Previously, you would be charged $5.00/month if you provisioned an EIP and didn’t use it. Now they are charging money for every IPv4 address you have allocated, whether you are using it or not. This move adds zero value to customers, but will likely add tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to their revenue numbers.

As a casual user of AWS for some of my personal projects, the risks of being hit by a surprise bill are becoming too high. I will be exploring other options and migrating off of AWS as soon as I can.

Medium

In a similar vein, Medium continues to do their best to ruin blogging. I’ve been noticing more and more articles are being locked behind a paywall. Either you need to have a paid subscription, or you have to be logged into a Medium account in order to read them. It’s getting to the point where I’m starting to pass on links when I see medium.com in the URL. It’s just not worth the hassle.

Some days I wonder if the modern web is too far gone, and whether it’s time to embrace newer protocols like Gemini and just leave the garbage web behind. So-called “platform” companies continue to “innovate” by taking open services and turning them into walled gardens and then charging money. I don’t think this what anyone envisioned the web would be like back in 1995.