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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

#421

Post by czgs2woh4ue3 »

Retric wrote: post #368
czgs2woh4ue3 wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

I'm hardly saying it's impossible; I'm saying that it's not easy, and may even be hard. Doing it well would likely require a wide-reaching effort the likes of which would eventually reach my ears, and the fact that I haven't heard of such a thing implies to me that it's probably not an AWS priority.

Why that would be, I leave to you.

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

#422

Post by thebruce87m »

dharmab wrote: post #403
k12sosse wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I routinely tell a coworker that isn't possible so that he does the work for me. Oh I know it's possible, I just don't want to do it. Thanks Corey! You're the best.

This works in help forums too. Post a question, there's a chance you get ignored. Post something wrong, and someone will flame you and answer your question.

Cunningham’s Law

(Had to resist the urge to post “Occam’s Razor” or some other incorrect thing to bait someone to correct me)

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

#424

Post by thebruce87m »

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.

I’m not sure I’d want a running business haemorrhaging $10,000/minute or whatever is possible for cloud compute.

My business is looking at cloud compute at the moment and we have absolutely no idea how to do it safely. In fact sagemaker is exactly a product we have looked at and discounted since we cannot be sure we can do it safely without getting unexpected megacharges.

We had an incident recently where a cellular router was set up to send a text message on a GPIO changing. The old firmware didn’t have pull-ups on the input. We told our end customer to update the firmware. They didn’t and also didn’t hook up the input and left it floating. We got a £20,000 bill for text messages as a result and a soured relationship with the customer.

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

#425

Post by dragonwriter »

KirillPanov wrote: post #296
dragonwriter wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Customer sets a monthly spend limit. Every time they start up an instance, create a volume, allocate an IP, or do anything else that costs money, you subtract the monthly cost of that new thing from their spend limit. If the spend limit would go negative, you refuse to create the new resource. AWS systems are highly distributed; this kind of sharp billing cap would necessarily introduce a new strong consistency req…

> AWS systems are highly distributed Hogwash, I tried to spin up 100 of your F1 instances in us-east-1 a week or two after they first became available, and found out about this thing called "limits". Wherever you're enforcing the limit on max number of instances per region is already a synchronization point of exactly the sort needed here. I'm sorry, this just doesn't pass the bullshit test. Resource allocation API c…

> Hogwash, I tried to spin up 100 of your F1 instances

I don’t have any F1 instances. Have you mistaken me for an AWS employee rather than a user?

> in us-east-1 a week or two after they first became available, and found out about this thing called "limits".

Yes, individual services, especially in individual regions, and especially a single type of resource within a service within a region like, say, instances in EC2, are often at least enough like centralized to impose hard limits reasonably well.

Billing accounts (and individual real projects which—and this is one disadvantage AWS has vs, say, GCP—AWS has only the weakest concept of) tend to span multiple resource types in each of multiple services, and sometimes multiple regions.

> Resource allocation API calls are not even remotely close to lightning-quick.

Resource allocation API calls that have high latency aren’t the only API calls that cost money and would need coordination. Heck, API calls aren’t the only thing that costs money.

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

#426

Post by ineedasername »

chpmrc wrote: post #109
ineedasername wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All states, with exceptions listed below, cap notary charge to $10 at most. Most states are less. These states don't have limits one way or another: Alaska Arkansas Iowa Kansas Kentucky Loisiana Maine Massachusetts Puerto Rico Tennessee Vermont

I'm not from the US.

Then you have not provided enough information to validate your claim. For example, the EU imposes price controls as well, while in Japan it can be expensive.

However, there's a much simpler route: Amazon is a US country, so you can simply use notorize.com for $25.

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

#427

Post by BackBlast »

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?

The breakdown isn't granular enough by far. ec2 is a very big bucket to go digging into for costs.

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

#428

Post by sharken »

k12sosse wrote: post #378
swiftcoder wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I routinely tell a coworker that isn't possible so that he does the work for me. Oh I know it's possible, I just don't want to do it. Thanks Corey! You're the best.

I had a smart coworker at one point, most of the time I asked for help with something, he would say that he did not know the answer.

Now I'm positive that he was doing the same thing as you describe.

The effect on me was a reduced interaction with that person, I'd much rather have an honest answer or a "I don't have time" answer.

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

#429

Post by sharken »

thebruce87m wrote: post #422
dharmab wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This works in help forums too. Post a question, there's a chance you get ignored. Post something wrong, and someone will flame you and answer your question.

Cunningham’s Law (Had to resist the urge to post “Occam’s Razor” or some other incorrect thing to bait someone to correct me)

You should have tried that, would have gotten the point across even more effectively :)

As someone who tries to always get things right, it somehow seems wrong to deliberately post wrong answers.

I know it won't go over well at Stackoverflow, which is one of the very best places to get accurate and helpful information.

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

#430

Post by stjohnswarts »

HumblyTossed wrote: post #99

> Corey Quinn, your first and last stop for any question that touches AWS billing, has called for an updated free tier that treats “personal learning” AWS accounts differently from “new corporate” accounts, and sets hard billing limits that you can’t exceed. This would be good. I don't normally do "cloud" stuff. It's just not my skill set. But I have looked at it on occasion and one thing that turns me off is my inab…

Yes,they should totally have a high water mark "trigger" so you could set a shutoff for $100 or whatever.
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