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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

#211

Post by hannofcart »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #168
hannofcart wrote: post #167

> ...an updated free tier that treats “personal learning” AWS accounts differently from “new corporate” accounts, and sets hard billing limits that you can’t exceed. Honestly, this is needed for corporate accounts as well. Not all companies are FAANG scale behemoths who can shrug off an unexpected charge. For a scrappy startup in India, an unexpected $5000 bill would be an existential threat.

A scrappy startup in India is not AWS' ICP.

Not sure why, but they courted our company right from the beginning: got in touch with us within a month of us forming up, gave us a generous free startup credit, even invited us over to their Bangalore office and helped us with how we can optimize our infra.

Thankfully, the company reached profitability so we pay them rather hefty bills now. But I guess I agree with you in that that's not a typical startup's trajectory, and their ROI from the aforementioned outreach is likely relatively low on average so am wondering now why they went out of the way to help us.

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

#212

Post by taftster »

Another solution to this problem is the availability of disposable credit cards. It would be ideal that credit card numbers could just be created from scratch, as needed, and turned off whenever the use was done.

We had promises of this as ecommerce took off, to help avoid fraud. But it seems these don't get widespread adoption, probably because purchases are easy to get chargebacks for (in general).

A hard limit for cloud purchases is surely needed. But because the cloud providers aren't giving us this, I'm wondering if a solution like disposable cards could?

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

#213

Post by alasdair_ »

dinkleberg wrote: post #164
jiggawatts wrote: post #136

Everyone: 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 s…

Which clouds do this? I work quite a bit with AWS and GCP, and Azure to a lesser extent, and I've yet to see a spending limit on any of them. I'd love to be proven wrong though.

GCP definitely has a spending limit. Of course it also (at least in the past) used to take 24 hours to update, so if you had a massive spike in real usage, your site would die for a day while you frantically tried to increase the limit.

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

#215

Post by mathattack »

paaakthecaaa wrote: post #74
artichokeheart wrote: post #24

AWS employs cost obfuscation by design otherwise the default view when you open the console would show you all of your current active services. Not only is that not the case, a single screen to show you all of your current active services doesn't exist. You need to take a deep dive into cost explorer (assuming you have access in corporate land) and try to decipher in what that all means.

They definitely need a senior executive to stand up and say, "The Customer wants us to be transparent in billing, fix that now." Then they need to start a team dedicated to finding a good way to let customers halt spending at a given limit with minimal impact on their operations. They already win on UX (okay, okay, it's an opinion ffs), but unlimited liability makes a lot of people very uncomfortable. Those two actio…

This gives the other vendors a wedge in.

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

#216

Post by gruez »

taftster wrote: post #212

Another solution to this problem is the availability of disposable credit cards. It would be ideal that credit card numbers could just be created from scratch, as needed, and turned off whenever the use was done. We had promises of this as ecommerce took off, to help avoid fraud. But it seems these don't get widespread adoption, probably because purchases are easy to get chargebacks for (in general). A hard limit for…

1. Does aws even accept prepaid cards? many providers don't dye to fraud/abuse concerns

2. Your payment method refusing to accept charges doesn't mean you're still not on the hook for them. Technically they can still send your bill to collections and wreck your credit report. They probably don't do this, but it's still a bad bandaid solution

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

#217

Post by lstamour »

amanzi wrote: post #203
dinkleberg wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which clouds do this? I work quite a bit with AWS and GCP, and Azure to a lesser extent, and I've yet to see a spending limit on any of them. I'd love to be proven wrong though.

Azure definitely has subscription types that have payment limits. I have one subscription that has some credits on it, and if I go over the limits all services are suspended (i.e. compute, storage, etc) and I can't do anything unless I add more money or wait until the next period starts and the new credits kick in. Not all Azure subscriptions types are like this though.

This would be the list: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-ca/support/legal/offer-detail...

Also documented at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cost-management-billi...

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

#218

Post by thayne »

dotproto wrote: post #89
paaakthecaaa wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They definitely need a senior executive to stand up and say, "The Customer wants us to be transparent in billing, fix that now." Then they need to start a team dedicated to finding a good way to let customers halt spending at a given limit with minimal impact on their operations. They already win on UX (okay, okay, it's an opinion ffs), but unlimited liability makes a lot of people very uncomfortable. Those two actio…

"They already win on UX" As someone that has tried and failed to get some small personal sites running on AWS a couple times, I'm going to have to tag this snippet with [citation needed].

From my admittedly limited experience with GCP and Azure (and this is obviously subjective), the UX in the most successful competition is, at best, no better than AWS. It isn't that AWS has good UX, just that all the cloud providers have bad UX.

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

#220

Post by therockspush »

nathanaldensr wrote: post #192
StratusBen wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclosure: I'm the Co-Founder of Vantage. This is exactly what we do with Vantage: http://vantage.sh/ We give point-in-time run-rates of all active resources based off of the region and resource/service configuration. In addition we try to simplify people's understanding of where their costs are coming from. If anyone needs help with this, they can personally reach out to me at ben@vantage.sh

With all due respect, I think the issue here is that your company should not need to exist. Amazon should provide this feature as part of the UX.

Agreed. Nothing new about this request.

It's like hiring a plane to fly over your house repeatedly to tell you whether or not it's on fire. There has to be a better way.

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