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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

#231

Post by modeless »

alasdair_ wrote: post #213
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.

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.

Why are people saying this? It's not true. App Engine had a spending limit, but it's deprecated and going away in July. The rest of GCP has never had a spending limit.

The best you can do is build your own service to monitor your bill and manually cut off your billing account if it gets too high. Hope you did it correctly because there's no good way to test it! And the bill notifications can be delayed an arbitrary amount of time with no guarantees, and disabling billing can take an arbitrary amount of time too, so you can still be screwed even if you did it correctly.

I think it's a glaring hole in cloud platforms. I get it, it's hard to implement in a way that is forgiving and doesn't cause a bunch of support tickets from people who set their limits too low and made their site go down. But that's why people use cloud platforms, so they don't have to implement the hard part. It's beyond me why the cloud platforms don't do something better here.

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

#232

Post by wyattpeak »

aprdm wrote: post #17

I really recommend using something like Linode for cheap throwaway, might be a bit more expensive (i.e: 5 per month), but the surprise factor disappears..

You'd have to be doing something extremely small to make a $5 Linode more expensive. AWS might be cheaper for a static site, but as soon as you involve a database you're probably paying more.

AWS is not cheap. A lot of people seem get bitten by this.

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

#233

Post by KirillPanov »

jenniferli23 wrote: post #196
nathanaldensr wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yea they should, but if it doesn't, are you gonna keep waiting or do something about it?

I would be more worried that if you do something about it, Amazon is gonna do something about you.

Starting with obnoxious API changes, followed by ToS changes. Hopefully that's as far as it has to go.

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

#234

Post by tapland »

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.

This is what keeps me from tinkering with the free tiers and never even attempt to host my own projects in the cloud.

I want a free tier with a lock on it. I'd very much appreciate advice for what tiers would fit my monthly use if I hit free tier caps, but if I got hit with $500 right now I'd be ruined.

I think my Google compute stuff is safe, but I really don't like having any doubt.

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

#235

Post by singlow »

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.

I don't understand why so many people want to use AWS for such small budgets. At that scale wouldn't it be easier to just build everything out of a few VMs at a cheap service?

AWS is awesome when you have a large number of resources, that are created programmatically and reproducibly, with redundancy and duplicate environments.

The budgeting tools are really amazing at letting you categorize your costs and create appropriate alerts. The permissions system lets you define very specific roles.

Its complex. But if your system is complex, it gives you the tools to keep track of it all. If you have a <=$5000/month budget, it is probably too small to make sense in AWS. You can probably run your system on a couple servers.

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

#236

Post by tomwojcik »

adamparsons wrote: post #108

I cancelled an account 2 years ago because no matter how much I explored cost manager or any regions I used, I can't find why I still get billed a small dollar or so a month. I still get bills on the 3rd of each month, followed by a "we can't charge your card" (I removed it when they pulled this shit) followed by a few days later you get the "hey we're gonna suspend your account if you don't pay" Yeah cool, I only cl…

Same! I literally closed an account and created a new one after a few months because I was charged a few bucks a month and I didn't know what I was paying for.

I think it was either related to db backup or some encryption keys but I couldnt find what and where to delete to get rid of this charge.

Nowadays I use aws only for route53 and s3.

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

#237

Post by tmk1108 »

I had an account with AWS about 6 years for a small prototype and I closed it after using it for 1 month. However for some reason I got an email last November about a change to some certificates for either S3 or Cloudfront because my account used one of those services in the last 6 months.

I don't know if this is a mistake on their part, but I haven't been charged in the last 6 years or gotten any emails before that. But it's still worrying because the account is closed and I have no way through standard support to know why they think my account was using their services

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

#238

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

therockspush wrote: post #227
WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that's an elastic IP, check under EC2. People forget to clean them up after shutting down the instance (probably kept in case you want to keep your IP)

It's crazy that it's so common, but that they wouldn't make that obvious. Considering the whole IPv4 extinction that's coming down and all.

So an elastic IP is just an AWS provided IP that they hand over to you... it's free while your instance is running but if you stop your instance, you get a small bill (it's like $0.84 a month)

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

#239

Post by graynk »

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 has a spending limit, but it is by no means transparent[0]

Basically you add a budget to your project, create a pub/sub channel, then make a lambda that subscribes to the channel and turns off billing when it receives an overbudget message to shut everything down.

Or you could integrate it into your project directly to handle this more gracefully.

You can even send a test message, to check that everything does indeed shut down, but the whole process is extremely clunky and error-prone.

[0] - https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/notify

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