Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

cloudirregular.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 457 posts

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

#261

Post by jonas21 »

kaishiro wrote: post #250
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…

"Every other cloud does this! They all have non-production subscription types with hard spending limits." This is simply not true, to the best of my knowledge. GCP has budget limits, which can send alerts , but outside of manually catching a pubsub and shutting down billing on your own, there are no configurable hard billing limits. I'm unsure what to make of the rest of your rant.

You can write a cloud function to automatically run when you go over the budget and shut down billing. They provide code for doing so in the docs:

https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/notify#cap_disa...

I'm not sure if that's what you meant by "manually catching a pubsub" -- you have to manually set up the script once, but it will run automatically when triggered.

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

#262

Post by katbyte »

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.

With azure you can set spending alerts at the very least.

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

#263

Post by katbyte »

indemnity wrote: post #43
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.

Azure does this a little better, but best would be to see a breakdown on the invoice with links directly back to the resource. Maybe there are discounts or other processing that makes this hard. Or, less charitably, this would lead to people optimising their costs a lot better and canceling unused services much sooner.

Azure groups most things into resource groups which greatly simplifies things.

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

#264

Post by kaishiro »

jonas21 wrote: post #261
kaishiro wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Every other cloud does this! They all have non-production subscription types with hard spending limits." This is simply not true, to the best of my knowledge. GCP has budget limits, which can send alerts , but outside of manually catching a pubsub and shutting down billing on your own, there are no configurable hard billing limits. I'm unsure what to make of the rest of your rant.

You can write a cloud function to automatically run when you go over the budget and shut down billing. They provide code for doing so in the docs: https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/notify#cap_disa... I'm not sure if that's what you meant by "manually catching a pubsub" -- you have to manually set up the script once, but it will run automatically when triggered.

Yes, well aware. I'm not sure if you actually looked at the code on that page but you have to catch the pub sub in the deployed cloud function in order to shut down billing on the project/account. This is precisely what I was referring to.

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

#265

Post by davidgatti »

blabitty wrote: post #255
davidgatti wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm not sure where the problem is. With IAM you can create a policy to limit the user to only use certain services, deploy only the cheapest type of instance type, limit the region, the time of day etc. All of this and more is built in to IAM by default. You can even create a CloudFormation as a internal product this way you can limit even more what people do, and budget for that. And on top of that you can make a La…

Is it reasonable to expect a brand new aws user to know how to do those things?

The same as it is not expected by anyone to know how to ride a bike or drive a car. Someone has to teach you or you have to go and take a course.

Same with any technology, you should read first all the documentation that there is, watch all the videos that AWS releases every year for free where they explain in detail every service that they have, and try to explain the best practices of it - this is all for free, or you could spend $1000 for a course, instead of risking to lose $10.000.

If you jump in to the water without knowing how to swim, and then get angry at the water because you drown - well...

After 18 years of age you become a grown up, because your parents are not responsible for you anymore. You become responsible for yourself. That is what distinguish a child from a grown up.

Of course a parent needs also to tech you responsibility and what it means.

Mine for example never did, and I had to learn life the hard way. At first I was blaming others, but then I realized that to really grow up, I need to stop blaming others and start owning my mistakes.

So, it is not expected for anyone to know everything, but it is expected that if you want to learn something new, you need to first research the topic.

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

#266

Post by pjc50 »

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…

I think I'm going to save this whole thread as "why zero friction micropayments are never going to happen".

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

#267

Post by nlitened »

jrockway wrote: post #70
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 t…

Are you being sarcastic?

> 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.

That does not sound like a good reason, but more like a crappy implementation of usage collection.

I don’t see why a bunch of Google engineers can’t implement real-time billing properly, and see no reason to defend their inability to do their job.

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

#268

Post by dragonwriter »

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…

> As the article points out: Every other cloud does this!

No, they don’t, the article is misleading if not technically wrong (since they use “and/or” to link billing caps and better whole-project deletion, the latter of which mitigates a subset of the problem but doesn’t address accidental unbounded spend from a project that you want active at some level) and the same general class of complaint is raised for the other clouds on this issue; the frequency of the complaints seems to vary (ordinally, but not linearly) with usage of the various clouds.

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

#269

Post by dragonwriter »

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.

> Is there seriously no way in AWS/Azure/GCP to specify "Here's my budget, shut everything down if I exceed $X"?

All of them have billing APIs which should, in principal, allow you to build “Shutdown everything at some indefinite time interval (and additional spend) after I exceed $X”, though you’ll need to do nontrivial custom coding to tie together the various pieces to do it, and actually stopping all spend is likely going to mean nuking storage, not just halting “active” services.

None of them provide anyway to more than probabilistically do “Shut everything down before I exceed, and in a way which prevents exceeding, $X.”

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

#270

Post by sebasvisser »

I thought I was just to incompetent to figure out how to stop an instance…so I just gave up while watching my creditcard getting billed for about €20 each month.. Last month I went full on and spent a few hours removing everything on every screen I could find. After many hours of failing to remove an instance because you have to stop a thingie from auto starting on another screen first…and another thingie from running there. I finally managed to remove all the instances…

Then two months later, I still get a bill for a few €…

I give up.

I Hate Amazon

Post reply on HN