I was hit by unplanned $43 aws bill three days ago, in our Nigerian economy $43 is a lot of money, I am still grieving.
Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt
331–340 of 457 posts
Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If we're talking about protecting users still trying to learn the cloud, what if they mess up the setup of this cloud function?
It's worse – for us, budget alerts often arrive several hours after the fact, when you already might have burned lots of money.
Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Annoyingly, Azure does have this capability! If your company is a Microsoft gold partner (there might be other requirements, I can't remember) then your Azure developer licenses comes with £100 free credit per month. When this money runs out, every service associated with that subscription just shuts down. It doesn't overrun, heck I don't remember even getting an email about it, they just stop until it renews the nex…
I even got a spending limit of 140€ / m? As dev in org
Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt
#334Earlier 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.
In Germany you can also get documents notarized in (Catholic) parish offices. I think they do it for free.
That said, this sounds unreasonable and if you're not in the US this may violate consumer protection regulations if they didn't require the same level of verification to sign the contract in the first place.
Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt
#335I 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 runnin…
You can try using this tool:
https://github.com/iann0036/former2
This will scan your entire account and list all of your resources - it's actually made for generating CloudFormation templates, but it's very useful for a use-case like yours.
Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt
#336Everyone: 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…
I'm also going to point out, as a former AWS engineer, that
"too hard" isn't in the AWS engineering vocabulary. If an AWS engineer were to dismiss something as "too hard", they'd be on the fast track to a performance-improvement-plan.
The problem isn't that it's too hard. It's that it isn't a business priority. As soon as it becomes prioritised, a legion of very smart AWS engineers will solve it.
Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt
#337[deleted]
Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 a…
Why should they if they can use obscurity and people's limited comprehension of their complicated systems to produce legitimate, legal bills to customers?
You're talking a 'get paid/don't get paid' decision here.
When you look at this on a high enough distributed level, across enough users, this is the profit margin. Enough people can screw up and then be able to pay the cloud provider, that it is part of the business model. You're required to run some chance of producing a legitimate megabill.
Why be forgiving when your business model requires that you set traps for fools?
Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt
#339Everyone: 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…
I'm also going to point out, as a former AWS engineer, that "too hard" isn't in the AWS engineering vocabulary. If an AWS engineer were to dismiss something as "too hard", they'd be on the fast track to a performance-improvement-plan. The problem isn't that it's too hard. It's that it isn't a business priority. As soon as it becomes prioritised, a legion of very smart AWS engineers will solve it.
This is in line with all the bad things I've heard about Amazon. Why do people work there?
Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Are you seriously suggesting that someone who wants to use AWS should go and read all the documentation and watch all the official videos available? That would take literally years. It's huge. It also doesn't solve the problem. If the user makes a mistake they still lose a ton of money. It's a really interesting problem. It's getting too big and too scary for a new developer to jump in and try AWS services, which mea…
I would not want to be the competing cloud service, with self-imposed limits of only what people are willing and expecting to pay, going up against Amazon (or any other cloud service of that scale) where they not only have scale already, but are being paid the extra money regularly by people screwing up in small to medium ways (even IF the most massive screwups are 'forgiven' to devs who wouldn't have been able to pay anyway, but have twitter)
I don't believe there will be any new services with better billing UX through competitive pressure. You're basically asking the competing thing to take less money in order to win, as the distinguishing factor. It doesn't make sense as a way for them to win against the larger thing taking more money.
Probably the only practical solution would be arbitrary legislation forbidding the practice, as if it was anti-usury laws. Basically taking the guise of society and saying 'you may not do this, even if people are dumb'. And then you've got a problem (at scale) of people figuring out how to do hit-n-run megabilling and walking away under the legislation, having intentionally taken what they 'mistakenly' did. An 'oops, I accidentally a bitcoin' defense.