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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

#351

Post by vagrantJin »

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.

Had Bizspark from microsoft which gave us access to Azure and about $300 in credits I think per service or the whole thing iirc. They shut down services once we went over that limit. This was back in 2016/2017

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

#352

Post by shubb »

kaydub wrote: post #350
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…

Nah, I think not. My business needs to run. Would be very painful if an engineer put in a hard shutdown at $X and then left the company only for me to find out after all my services are shutdown when we've grown past $X. This is a hard no from me. How is AWS going to even know what to shutdown/remove? What if it's storage causing my bill to overextend? Yeah, not just no, but hell no.

What if that engineer fat fingered and reserved a million GPU instances instead though?

It would be nice if cloud providers were better at surfacing potentially company killing things via their dashboards and nag emails.

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

#353

Post by kaydub »

cosarara wrote: post #308
theshrike79 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

This is considered a cloud native pattern.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/apigateway/latest/developerguide...

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

#354

Post by crispyambulance »

swiftcoder wrote: post #336
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…

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.

As an antidote to the "nothing is too hard" flex...

Everything has trade-off's. When a responsible person says something is "too hard" it's because they've evaluated the consequences and have deemed them too costly in terms of time, resources, cost, maintenance, or strategy/lost-opportunity. Some things really are "too hard".

I agree it's not too hard technically but am surprised at your contradictory suggestion AWS would deploy "a legion of very smart engineers" to solve it if they decided to implement that ordinary feature. How smart are they?

I suspect the truth here is a bit more ugly. AWS doesn't want to do it because they see the pocket-change taken from accidental mishaps as a net positive. They don't care if it inflicts suffering on students and novices. Sure, they'll fix individual cases if they're shamed publicly or if the individual contacts them in exactly the right way, but at the end of the day, it's more money in their pocket. For every 200 dollar oopsie that gets charged back, how many go silently paid in humiliation and hardship?

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

#355

Post by theshrike79 »

cosarara wrote: post #308
theshrike79 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

It's a common backend for chat bots (Discord, Matrix, IRC, Telegram).

Basically it takes different inputs and commands and uses different APIs to fetch data based on the input efficiently without the need for web scraping. DynamoDB is used mostly as a cache for common queries so I don't go over API quotas.

Most of the bots are made by me, but with AWS API Gateway I can easily generate API keys for anyone else and keep track of their usage.

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

#356

Post by tr1ll10nb1ll »

The exact thing happened to me one year ago, I was 17 and using my dad's credit card to test out Lambda and SageMaker, I had assured him it won't cost anything since I'd be using the free tier.

However, my application instance somehow kept running ( was a total noob to AWS ) and I got charged over $300 the next month when I got a monthly report in an email. I panicked and literally just deleted my account. Yes, I just nuked my account like the article mentions. AWS never reached out after that.

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

#357

Post by xdennis »

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 used the AWS free plan many many years ago as a student. I was so paranoid about losing money that I immediately shut what I was using down after I thought I didn't need it any more (even though leaving it on was part of the free plan). I turned off the instance, but I forgot the public IP. A month later I got charted a few pennies because an associated public IP is part of the free plan, but an un-associated one isn't.

I didn't go bankrupt, but it proved to me how scummy AWS can be given that actually trying to use less is what got me charged.

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

#358

Post by bitwize »

It's the AOL free trial business model. Give 'em a freebie, but take down their credit card info so you can start charging them the moment they exceed the limits of "free". And make it really hard to cancel.

As for whether Amazon will listen, Upton Sinclair blah blah not understanding it.

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

#359

Post by rataata_jr »

civilized wrote: post #131

Anyone who asks you for a credit card or other means to bill you for a "free" service intends to steal money from you without your consent

Its not stealing. You are using their services for free now which can / will be charged later.

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

#360

Post by INTPenis »

I use aws relatively often but for fairly small scale stuff, selfhosting/homelab. I'm very scared of all these horror stories.

I've set a budget and an alert for the budget. Is that enough?

I can see the budget being overdrawn for the time it takes me to react to the alert but I see no way to actually shut down servies.

It would probably be possible to script by monitoring the API and then issuing aws commands to shut things down. But it would be a huge project, someone should get on that.

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