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Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

cloudirregular.substack.com

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Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#61

Post by akerl_ »

userbinator wrote: post #52
akerl_ wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That seems even more implausible. Do charges small enough to not be noticed stand a chance of being noteworthy for AWS?

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#62

Post by nineplay »

HomeDeLaPot wrote: post #19

Is 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.

Azure will alert you when you exceed a budget, but it won't disable anything.

Azure MongoDB billing was insanity. I was up to $800 to host a couple of GB that wasn't doing anything.

I'm still not sure what happened, even their support kept saying "it's priced by request units" and I kept saying "How does a handful of queries a day translate to $40 in request units?"

A year later, I think that I had a lot of collections and they seem to charge per-collection, but I'm still not even sure. Thank goodness we moved off of it after only a month or two.

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#63

Post by saurik »

willcipriano wrote: post #48
eric4smith wrote: post #6

Yup. Got charged over $800 for "experimenting" with a DynamoDB database and forgetting to delete it afterwards. Sure, I called customer support and they reversed the charges. But something the nice lady on the other end said as she chuckled: "This happens all the time". DigitalOcean is the worst with the dormant accounts. Just got dinged around $2.40 on my credit card. Going into DO I could not find what was causing…

Apparently I owe AWS 1 cent for DNS. The problem is I can't login to pay it, so every month I get a email that says "your aws account is going to be suspended" and 30 days later I'm disappointed that they didn't follow through with the threat.

I wonder if there is a human whose job is to final review suspensions and they just keep shaking their head at the measly pending $0.01 charge.

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#64

Post by userbinator »

When you realise that their whole business model is around extracting as much $$$ from users as they can, you should be entirely unsurprised by how AWS and other cloud providers behave. My cynical side is inclined to say "see, this is what you get for using cloud computing". Cloud providers are the very definition of nickel-and-diming. I still remember the amusement of finding out that AWS has Cost Management services, which themselves have a cost.

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#65

Post by cesarb »

snorkel wrote: post #56
HomeDeLaPot wrote: post #19

Is 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.

The whole point of a "spending kill switch" is as a backstop when you make a mistake; but if you do it as a "DIY project", what prevents you from making a mistake on it? It has to be a built-in feature.

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#66

Post by TameAntelope »

akerl_ wrote: post #30
throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #16

Oh 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.

It's got to be Hanlon's Razor here, I doubt AWS is twirling their mustache and cackling maniacally. It's probably a difficult problem to solve and not easily attachable to a profit center or something, so nobody feels empowered to actually fix it.

I'm sure some crusader within AWS could get it done if they tried hard enough and collected the data to show the negative side effects and how they effect AWS.

An article like this one is hopefully going to get someone within AWS to do just that.

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#67

Post by Silhouette »

The crazy thing is, this obvious (to anyone experienced in business, at least) danger must be costing AWS money. I personally know of small businesses who have entirely avoided AWS even though it might have been a good fit for their needs in most respects, entirely because of concerns about the opacity of the billing and the inability to add safeguards in case something goes wrong. Some of those businesses are no longer small, either. AWS does have a reputation, at least among those more familiar with cloud services, for being reasonable about unexpected charges and probably putting something right if it was obviously not intended. But in that case, they aren't even pulling some sort of dark pattern scam to make more money here, and the lack of last resort safety features makes even less sense...

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#68

Post by markus_zhang »

maxgashkov wrote: post #60
HomeDeLaPot wrote: post #19

Is 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…

They can simply add a nuclear option. Ordinary business probably won't enable that option but individuals can and should set it up.

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#69

Post by ghaff »

maxgashkov wrote: post #60
HomeDeLaPot wrote: post #19

Is 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…

I think there's a good argument that they could do better. But there's also probably an argument that harder circuit breakers would result in posts like "AWS destroyed my business right when I was featured in the New York Times"--including things like deleting production data. I'm sort of sympathetic to the idea that AWS should have an experimental "rip it all down" option and kill all stateless services option but that adds another layer of complexity and introduces more edge cases.

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#70

Post by jrockway »

HomeDeLaPot wrote: post #19

Is 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.

I think the big problem is that usage collection is a few days out of date, at least for GCP. Autoscaling can react in seconds to increased load, but it takes about 3 days before that shows up on your cost reports. You can burn through a lot of cloud resources in 3 days.

GCP at least has some provision to get very detailed information about usage (but not cost) that updates in less than an hour. That, to me, is the tool for building something like "shut down our account if usage is too high". It is annoying that you have to code this yourself, but ultimately, it kind of makes sense to me. Cloud providers exist to rent you some hardware (often with "value-add" software); it's the developer and operator's responsibility to account for every machine they request, every byte they send to the network, every query they make to the database, etc. and to have a good reason for that. To some extent, if you don't know where you're sending bytes, or what queries you're making, how do you know if your product is working? How do you know that you're not hacked? Reliability and cost go hand in hand here -- if you're monitoring what you need to assure reliability, costs probably aren't confusingly accumulating out of control.

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