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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

#361

Post by boruto »

tr1ll10nb1ll wrote: post #356

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 jus…

Hey I did the same when I first used it. Raked up 9000 Rupees. Cancelled the card and called them, customer care said no worries and the bill was gone.

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

#363

Post by Buttons840 »

SavantIdiot wrote: post #154
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.

If I go to billing I can see an itemized breakdown of every service I'm using. What is wrong with that?

Students and self-learners want to experiment with doing complicated things on AWS without getting a surprise $3,000 bill because their script didn't shut down those instances like they thought it did. They want a hard fail-safe to protect them from surprise bills. And they want a solution that's easier and more reliable than checking the AWS itemized breakdown twice a day.

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

#364

Post by mellavora »

anothernewdude wrote: post #326
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…

My business uses off-cloud backups, devops and prepaid credit cards to limit our risk exposure.

Forgive me if I am out of line, but as I understand it, your company would still be legally liable for the debt. So even if blew past your prepaid card limit, your company would still have an obligation to pay using an alternative method.

Not a lawyer, etc, and don't even know what jurisdiction you are in or what providers you use, so this is just a general caution that your strategy may not generalize to other companies.

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

#365

Post by jawns »

kaydub wrote: post #349

I'm in agreement with the cloud providers over those of you wanting a hard shutdown. Businesses, the entities that are paying the most money to AWS, will NOT want a hard shutdown. When you generate revenue off of your SaaS service maybe you'll understand. No, I won't be pushing my TAM to enable a forced shutdown due to budget metrics. Not to mention, how does AWS decide what to shutdown and what to delete? It's not l…

> Businesses, the entities that are paying the most money to AWS, will NOT want a hard shutdown.

I don't think anyone is arguing that any account MUST take advantage of hard shutdowns. Only that it should be an option for those who truly do want it.

> How does AWS decide what to shutdown and what to delete?

That's a much more interesting question. It tends to be services, rather than storage, that are the root cause of these outlandishly large surprise bills. But if, by chance, it's S3 that's running up the bill, what would a hard shutdown mean? Which data does Amazon delete first to get the account down to its hard limit?

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

#367

Post by mgkimsal »

murukesh_s wrote: post #201
dotproto wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"They already win on UX" As someone that has tried and failed to get some small personal sites running on AWS a couple times, I'm going to have to tag this snippet with [citation needed].

agreed especially when compared to say Heroku or Digital ocean. I see many new comers struggling to deploy a small website. It's overwhelming. I understand that Heroku exists for such users and they are using AWS under the hood, but is there any service which takes AWS cloud APIs and simplifies it with a leaner UX?

I think there's some verticals - players that simplify/aggregate SES, or S3, or whatever - but none that handle being a layer on top of most/all of AWS.

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

#368

Post by Retric »

czgs2woh4ue3 wrote: post #242
Retric wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Small, cheap things like "a single DynamoDB query" or "a byte of bandwidth" are often also high-volume, and you don't want to introduce billing checks to critical paths for reliability / latency / cost reasons” That’s hardly necessary. Let’s suppose you have some service that costs 1 cent every 1,000 queries. If you’re billing it then you need to be keeping track of it and incrementing some counter somewhere. If old…

That counter may well not exist outside of billing for longer than it takes to batch some records together. It will need to be shared and synchronized with the rest of the fleet, the other fleets in the availability zone, the other zones in the region, the other regions, and every other service in AWS. There are strict rules about crossing these boundaries for sake of failure isolation. As an amusing extra sticking p…

First arguing based on existing infrastructure ignores the fact your changing the system therefore any new system is a viable option. All the existing system changes is how much things cost. Anyway, for independent distributed systems you can use probability rather than fixed numbers.

That said, your losing the forest for the trees, the accuracy isn’t that important. You can still bill for actual usage. A 15 minute granularity is vastly better than a 30 day one. As long as you can kill processes you don’t need to check in the middle of every action. Things being asynchronous is just the cost of business at scale.

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

#370

Post by easton »

worble wrote: post #324
ryan29 wrote: post #302

Earlier 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…

That's exactly the same way that Azure for Students works, which is why I use it instead of AWS Educate (well, that and because Azure doesn't limit what services you can use your $100 on, unlike AWS).
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