Anyone who asks you for a credit card or other means to bill you for a "free" service intends to steal money from you without your consent
Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt
131–140 of 457 posts
Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt
#132Is 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.
On top of the other reasons for complexity and delay, this just creates another potential mistake where people delete their entire accounts or stop production services.
It's far easier to negotiate dollar amounts than lost data or service uptime.
Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt
#133Earlier 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.
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 l…
I think this is actually the failure mode for companies like AWS: they may earnestly be so large/complex that no well-intentioned crusader can push through an improvement like this.
My gut is that this is actually the cause of most of the “evil” things that “large” companies do, where eventually they get so big and/or complicated that organizing an organic positive change isn’t plausible.
Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any bank at which you are a customer will notarize documents for you for free.
I'm not from the US. This is not available in any of my banks.
If notarization isn't common in the country where you are, you should probably escalate through AWS support in that country. They probably have an alternate procedure. If you're talking to US-based support, they are used to thinking this is a trivial request. Getting something notarized is something that can be handled in 5 minutes at places as common as convenience stores. Most people have coworkers that are notaries and can do it without even getting up from their desk.
If that's not the case in your country, ask them for a different procedure. It's not something they intend to be onerous.
Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt
#135This is the problem with usage based pricing. It is very lucrative pricing strategy because it works for lower end of market as well as enterprise users. One way to resolve this is to offer fixed tier based pricing for customers who may be more sensitive to prices and usage based pricing for enterprise clients.
For example.
Starter ($5/mo) - Use up to 100,000 API calls each month.
Growth ($30/mo) - Use up to 1,000,000 API calls each month.
Enterprise ($149/mo) - Use up to 10,000,000 API calls each month. After that, $10 for every 1 million calls.
Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt
#136Everyone: PLEASE stop making the argument that it's "too hard" or even "impossible" to implement spending limits.
As the article points out: Every other cloud does this! They all have non-production subscription types with hard spending limits.
There's a difference between "unable" and "unwilling".
The people that refuse to understand the difference are the same people that don't understand that "unsupported" isn't synonymous with "cannot be made to function".
Don't be that person.
If you have a large account and you're in regular contact with an AWS sales representative, pressure them into making this happen. Even if you work for Megacorp with a $$$ budget, keep in mind that your future hires need to start somewhere, need to be able to learn on their own, and need to do so safely.
Don't walk down the same path as IBM's mainframes, where no student anywhere ever has been able to learn on their own, making it a dead-end for corporations who pay billions for this platform. You, or your company will eventually pay this price if AWS keeps this IBM-like behaviour up.
Think of the big picture, not just your own immediate personal situation.
Apply this pressure yourself, because the students you want to hire next year can't.
Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt
#137A major problem is that there's no easy way to see all resources in a single view for any cloud.
Azure comes closest in the dashboard but still misses some items. GCP has an Asset Inventory page in the Security section for an organization. AWS can use the Tag Editor to browse all the regions. It's notable that none of them have a single clear page though.
Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt
#138> It was ‘just’ $200, that’s not the end of the world
A $200 charge would have been devastating to me when I was in college. As in, I may have to beg for food devastating.
Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt
#139Goodness - reading these statements makes me laugh - "sinister" "evil" "by design".
Reality - very few folks want a hard billing limit.
To stop charging you AWS would need to delete all your EBS and S3 volumes, stop all EC2 instances, release all public IP's, delete all AWS directories and the list goes on. The idea that AWS would build this giant data loss footgun into their system is ridiculous.
Somewhere in AWS someone said, how could this blow up, and they came up with 100 ways, including misconfigured cost accounting etc.
That said, the GCP project based model makes more sense to me, give you more control etc.
That said, if there is such demand for hard billing limit playgrounds (I'm sure there is but not by folks giving AWS a lot of money), someone should be able to do a hosted solution for AWS that bills into their corp account and gives you a playground for learning (with a real hard billing limit). That type of approach is used in a lot of other contexts already.
Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt
#140I don't understand why there isn't at least a setting that says "turn everything off if I hit $x." Then just given people a certain grace period to reactivate or get their data out before it's removed. It wouldn't fix production deployments where you want alarms, not a shutdown, when you hit spending caps, but it would help people on the dev stage to avoid issues like this.
becase the billing proces is seprate from the other processes
Can't they just throw an event to EventBridge