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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

#301

Post by bryanrasmussen »

dragonwriter wrote: post #276
puszczyk wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can by insure for you as a driver and for your car (and in many jurisdictions have to) — this limits your responsibility. You can spend $10000 on AWS and still make a mistake and pay another $10k+. I don’t get the point that AWS docs are free. I mean, they are free, but the services are not. Do you pay for a visit in a car dealership?

> You can by insure for you as a driver and for your car (and in many jurisdictions have to) — this limits your responsibility Real insurance policies have maximum coverage limits, so, while it reduces your liability by a capped amount, it doesn’t, strictly speaking, limit it; you still face unbounded potential liability beyond your insurance coverage.

what's the biggest unexpected billing of AWS fees reported? I'm thinking 100,000 seems unlikely to be reached very often.

on edit: this is not to say that I believe an insurance for this kind of thing would really work (although maybe that is because I know nothing about the insurance business) just that I don't think the problem with the insurance would be that you could always end up getting billed more than you were insured for.

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

#302

Post by ryan29 »

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.

They don't. I've looked. They all have some ultra complex scheme for monitoring billing and programmatically shutting down services, which is a favorite recommendation by apologists, but none have a nice, solid "shut down everything" plan that's usable for learning and testing.

AWS does have billing actions which are fairly new, but they're still a bit too difficult to deal with if you also follow the advice for setting up a root account for billing plus sub-accounts / organizations for use.

Azure has been ignoring the request for over 8 years [1]. There's a warning they're moving away from User Voice to a product-by-product solution for feedback, so that request might disappear altogether. I reached out to them and politely asked for an update and they said they'd look into it, but it's been over a month and I don't think there's going to be an update without some pressure. If anyone has a good social media following and would like to see hard caps on spending in Azure, tweet @AzureSupport. Maybe if enough people do they'll actually follow up.

> PLEASE stop making the argument that it's "too hard" or even "impossible" to implement spending limits.

I agree 100% with this because all I really want is something along the lines of the "personal learning" account that's described in the article. I want a dev / testing account where I can learn and test assumptions about billing without risking a massive overage that I wasn't expecting. They don't have to get into the complexities of dealing with production accounts.

AWS, Azure, and GCP have all had close to a decade to figure it out, so I think the only way it'll happen is if we start asking legislators to regulate those providers. It would be relatively simple in my opinion. Cloud infrastructure providers must allow users to indicate a maximum amount of spending per month and may not charge more than the indicated amount.

I think big tech is proving they can't self regulate, so it's time to quit letting them.

1. https://feedback.azure.com/forums/170030-signup-and-billing/...

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

#303

Post by wraptile »

One hack I've learned once I got burned by similar service is to always use virtual debit card with a spending limit if your bank supports one. I have a virtual card on Revolut dedicated to small subscriptions that freezes at 100$/month to prevent this sort of fraud.

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

#304

Post by ryan29 »

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.

It's something that's frustrated me about Azure for years. They can do it, but they won't do it for pay-as-you-go accounts.

Make a SKU that's not for production with a $100 setup fee to prevent abuse and prepaid credits for consumption.

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

#305

Post by mobilemidget »

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.

Same respect, nice tool, but it is sad it is needed. But I guess it's similar to lawyers, police, army, I don't like the need for them, it, but good they exist.

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

#306

Post by Aeolun »

ufmace wrote: post #175
thedevelopnik wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not trying to be snarky here, would like an honest opinion: how do they win on UX? Are there specific things you like there? I’ve used all three major clouds in production now and I dread using the AWS console. Or really any part of it, over Azure or GCP. I’ve always thought of them as purely winning the “nobody got fired for…” mindshare thing despite having a thoroughly mediocre product.

Their web console UIs vary widely by service. IMO, the UX for most of their simpler services, specifically SQS, S3, Lambda, DynamoDB, are really easy to use and work nicely. If you want to start with a Docker image, send it to AWS, and have it get spun up and attached to a DNS, well that's a huge complex mess to get set up.

Unless you use something like Terraform or Pulumi, in which case it’s almost a one liner.

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

#307

Post by jsmith99 »

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.

AWS has that too - you can trigger actions on budget alerts such as stopping activity https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws-cost-management/get-started...

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

#308

Post by cosarara »

theshrike79 wrote: post #252
singlow wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 app…

> At that scale wouldn't it be easier to just build everything out of a few VMs at a cheap service? I have a handful of AWS Lambda functions with a DynamoDB backend serving hundreds of clients, my bill for the month of April was $0.01. No, a VM wouldn't cut it. But you are right that there are certain slots where AWS doesn't make sense: There's one in the lower middle range where you can save a bunch of money by usin…

> I have a handful of AWS Lambda functions with a DynamoDB backend serving hundreds of clients, my bill for the month of April was $0.01.

What kind of thing do they serve? Somewhere I could read more about this kind of project?

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

#309

Post by ryan29 »

rk06 wrote: post #245
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 gives you credits to spend. And after you have exhausted your credits, then they don't charge more. If you have Visual Studio professional or enterprise license, then you can avail recurring credits, which are useful for learning

Yeah, but that's $45 USD per month which is an expensive way to learn and test things that would normally cost <$5. It does get you $50 per month of Azure credits though, so it's probably the route I'd go if it's possible to buy a month of Visual Studio and ignore everything but the Azure credits.

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

#310

Post by Aeolun »

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…

Isn’t DO some random saved image from years ago? I’m still paying them for a few of those I think.
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