Funny story: I keep receiving a $0.01 monthly invoice from AWS for a very old account (opened 5+ years ago) I have lost access to. I have no idea why (the invoice doesn't list the services being used) and the associated credit card has expired a long time ago. They requested notarized documents to prove my identity. Obviously I'd rather settle my $6 (+ interest) debt 50 years from now than give hundreds to a notary today!
Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt
51–60 of 457 posts
Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt
#52Oh come on. We all know that the 'accidental revenue' from the way Free Tier is set up probably makes up a cool 2 million or more annually. Plenty to justify its continued abuse of naive students. Why would they walk away from that cash? The only people they're pissing off is people who aren't using AWS anyway.
I’ve heard of plenty of people accidentally blasting past the free tier, or past dev credits, or other ways where they got burned by a surprise bill. 100% of those people have gotten a refund from AWS support by filing a ticket. AWS pretty clearly isn’t raking in money on this. Even at your imaginary 2 million a year, that’s a drop in the bucket for AWS, let alone Amazon.
AWS bets on everyone who doesn't notice small recurring charges, not those who blow up their budget past the point of sanity.
Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt
#53Is there seriously no way in AWS/Azure/GCP to specify "Here's my budget, shut everything down if I exceed $X"? I don't use those platforms much but was always surprised I couldn't find anything like that right off the bat. I'll build cloud stuff if it makes sense at work, but if I'm footing the bill I'll stick to something that can provide an actual upper limit.
It's not real time billing, so there is no real way to disable service until costs have been determined.
I agree that it seems like a solvable problem, but it doesn't make them money so why should they care?
Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt
#54> “It’s the student’s responsibility to know what they’re deploying.”
Anyone who seriously argues this is 100% unaware of the quagmire that is AWS billing. There are companies with entire teams built around just optimizing AWS billing - it's whole unsurprising that some AWS feature actually spun up 5 separate AWS features that end up being billed.
Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt
#55Lots of companies also gets hacked each month for thousands of dollars because some key to S3 with too many privileges gets leaked.
The entire system is completely sinister. The fact that keys pertaining to S3 has anything do with being able to start hundreds of VM's in different parts of the AWS system or do whatever is bad.
I've seen companies be ruined by this, and it's in no way obvious how stupid their system is. You have to read huge manuals to know how to "only give access to s3" through a key.
Instead of starting with "no access" then adding atomized access you have to understand this extremely complex "json privilege system". Instead of just programming, this is the only allowed IP, the is the only allowed bucket, this is the only allowed service, and my max is 200usd, or something to that effect.
Also the fact that a key can start new services that are billable is almost criminal in my mind when people don't even gen an email when it happens - makes zero sense.
Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt
#56Is there seriously no way in AWS/Azure/GCP to specify "Here's my budget, shut everything down if I exceed $X"? I don't use those platforms much but was always surprised I couldn't find anything like that right off the bat. I'll build cloud stuff if it makes sense at work, but if I'm footing the bill I'll stick to something that can provide an actual upper limit.
A spending kill switch can be setup on AWS using AWS Budgets alerts and Lambda but it’s a DIY project, not a built-in feature.
Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt
#57Funny story: I keep receiving a $0.01 monthly invoice from AWS for a very old account (opened 5+ years ago) I have lost access to. I have no idea why (the invoice doesn't list the services being used) and the associated credit card has expired a long time ago. They requested notarized documents to prove my identity. Obviously I'd rather settle my $6 (+ interest) debt 50 years from now than give hundreds to a notary t…
Any bank at which you are a customer will notarize documents for you for free.
Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt
#58I tried signing up with a prepaid credit card and they refused the card so I moved on. It's setup for massive profits on minor mistakes. The risk on a free tier is like shorting a stock, one bad day and you go bankrupt unless you have a connected twitter account.
Sounds like a new dystopian future that is best not to be part of.
When IBM ruled or Microsoft or AOL things you had one main evil corp. We're in a period where Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook can appear the hero or villian depending on the day but the sum of the faangs is much greater than the worst evils of the original megacorps. Could you envision forced unlimited billing on a free tier with no ability to limit charges on the account?
Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt
#59Funny story: I keep receiving a $0.01 monthly invoice from AWS for a very old account (opened 5+ years ago) I have lost access to. I have no idea why (the invoice doesn't list the services being used) and the associated credit card has expired a long time ago. They requested notarized documents to prove my identity. Obviously I'd rather settle my $6 (+ interest) debt 50 years from now than give hundreds to a notary t…
It doesn’t cost hundreds of dollars to notarize something. https://www.nationalnotary.org/knowledge-center/about-notari...
Edit: as the other comment mentions, most banks where you have an account offer this for free. My local UPS store where I have a mailbox also offers the service to me for free.
Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt
#60Is there seriously no way in AWS/Azure/GCP to specify "Here's my budget, shut everything down if I exceed $X"? I don't use those platforms much but was always surprised I couldn't find anything like that right off the bat. I'll build cloud stuff if it makes sense at work, but if I'm footing the bill I'll stick to something that can provide an actual upper limit.
That’s extremely hard to design, at least with the current state of what AWS bills and does not bill.
Example: let’s assume you’ve set the cut-off budget too strict, spun off another shard for your stateful service (DB for example), it received and stored some data during the short window before some other service brought whole account over budget (i.e. paid egress crossed the threshold).
To bring VM and EBS charges to 0 (to implement your idea of ‘shut down everything’) AWS will have to delete production data.
While it may be OK when you’re experimenting, it’s really hard to tell in automated way.
So, to fully comply w/o risking losing customer data, AWS will have to stop charging for not running instances and inactive EBS volumes which most definitely bring on many kinds of abuse.
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There may be some other way to do this, maybe mark some services expendable or not, so they are stopped in the event of overspend.