Forum Discussion

mmattcam's avatar
mmattcam
Streaming Star
5 years ago

Amazon AWS charges on free tier?

Hoping the community can assist me again.  I'm very new to all of this.

To store and feed my new channel I've signed up with Amazon AWS and created an S3 bucket via the "12 month free tier" as I've been advised to do and have read about others doing.

I only have about 12 videos and 12 PNGs and a json file here.

Obviously building and checking, I've had to delete and reload a few things (and have a little more to do),

I've linked my objects in the bucket to my channel in ROKU, installed everything on my ROKU device, and am able to see and play things.

But suddenly after a couple of week I received this notice from Amazon:

AWS Free Tier usage limit alerting via AWS Budgets

our AWS account xxxxxxxxx has exceeded 85% of the usage limit for one or more AWS Free Tier-eligible services for the month of December.

 

AWS Free Tier Usage as of 12/16/2020AWS Free Tier Usage Limit
13.91202353 GB15 GB of bandwidth out aggregated across all AWS services

 

I'm hoping someone else understands this, and can guide me through whatever error I've made, or tell me if this seems to be in error.  When I contacted Amazon directly I was told I'm being charged for "data transfer" but they can't tell me what or where, and in order to solve the issue I should

1.  Set a bucket policy that only allows access to my bucket to the people and processes I expect?  Not sure how to do that since I have no idea once my channel is up who might try to play the videos on it?

2.  Delete the files within the bucket itself.  Which if I do that then --no channel.

I thought I would be able to put up the resources such as videos and graphics and the json file here, update them and add to them, have people watch once my channel is up, and not incur charges for 12 months--is this not correct.  Again, hoping a more experienced publisher might assist.

Roku Direct Publisher

3 Replies

  • mmattcam's avatar
    mmattcam
    Streaming Star
    5 years ago

    Just an added note the actual charges on the "free" tier appear associated with a move of data from one region to another (something I'm not aware that I've done).

    I'm going through the site to try and properly configure things, if anyone has any insight to share much appreciated.

    • Baradanikto's avatar
      Baradanikto
      Roku Guru
      5 years ago

      I also use S3.  In my experience, the free tier provides 5GB of total storage. 

      • Is your channel accessible in the channel store? 
      • If so, is it possible you have channel viewers already?
      • Are you using the AWS CloudFront service?  It's a caching service that will incur charges.
      • Have you checked analytics in the Roku developer portal?  It should tell you where the channel access is coming from.
      • To my recollection, when you set up a bucket, you have to indicate a 'Region'.  Have you selected a region that contains several locales?  If so, you may need to redefine it to select one region.
      • mmattcam's avatar
        mmattcam
        Streaming Star
        5 years ago

        Thanks for the response Baradanikto,

        My channel isn't public yet, I'm still working out a few things so that is part of the reason I'm concerned about the charges.

        Looks like they are doubling up the GB I'm using so maybe that was a case of something not being deleted before something else was added, although I am probably a little over the 5 GB limit.  No charges seen there yet though.

        I'm wondering if as you mentioned the problem could be the region.  I see there is a transfer from one reason to another which if I somehow did I didn't intend to.  I'm trying to figure out how to see if there are duplicate resources in different regions or something like that.  Amazon says they aren't allowed to look at it, so just sent links which I'll have to try to understand how to see the info I want.