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Avoid Surprise Bills from AWS

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Re: Avoid Surprise Bills from AWS

#41

Post by mullingitover »

sergiotapia wrote: post #33
mullingitover wrote: post #13

If you're using Datadog with its AWS integration, you can pull in your billing metrics and set up anomaly detection monitoring. If you set it up as a multi-alert, Datadog can event alert you on the specific category that has a billing anomaly.

Use one opaque black box of costs to get clarity on another opaque black box of costs. I don't recommend this. Datadog very quickly adds on costs for things you have no idea you need or want. You have an additional "host parametrix double-channel provider" and it's an extra $200/month per 2000 items. 2000 items of what? I don't know but you are at 1900 now and there's still 10 days to go in the month. Also, to manage…

It's not like hand-rolling the equivalent services that DD provides is free.

> now you're at $2189.48 and counting.

This is a wonderful bargain compared to the expense of hiring a full-time engineer (or more) to provision and maintain all the infrastructure that DD replaces.

Re: Avoid Surprise Bills from AWS

#42

Post by dkersten »

zatarc wrote: post #6

Step 1: Avoid AWS.

After trying to set up Fargate and it only sending my logs to cloudwatch 25% of the time (Id deploy and get no logs, try again two to three times literally just clicking the button in the web console again and then it would work), if course AWS charged me for every . Two days and a $150 bill later I got fed up and moved to DigitalOcean App platform, where I fixed the issue (was a bug in my health checks) within ten minutes and a monthly bill of $10. That day I decided I will never again use AWS unless I can pay someone who really knows what they’re doing to do it for me (and I have a good reason to actually want to use AWS). My life has been much less stressful since.

Re: Avoid Surprise Bills from AWS

#43

Post by shampine »

pan69 wrote: post #32
eqmvii wrote: post #9

If only there were a way to stop the surprise billing once it starts. A friend created an AWS account with a new email address for a one-off side project, and wound up locked out of both the email account and the AWS account. But AWS has the credit card, so a 25 cent mystery charge appears every month. AWS support is completely useless despite years of attempts at escalation, and of course the credit card company can…

I had a similar thing recently. As I understand it, AWS uses a digital token for your added a credit card. Contact your card provider to renew/rotate/delete the digital token that is attached to your card. That should stop charges. Doing that obviously might impact other services for which you use that card so you might need to re-add your card to those services.

Generally tokenization is done by some vault or processor. I don't know how Amazon operates internally, due to their scale means it's probably all in house. But Visa does have token representations and they do also have visa account updater (which keeps visa/merchants in sync for saved instruments .. e.g. Netflix). I've never seen the token implemented, generally just some vault (Braintree, Spreedly, etc). And if you are typing in a 15/16 digit number it's likely being vaulted/tokenized but not by the issuer but by the merchant/processor.

Re: Avoid Surprise Bills from AWS

#44

Post by [deleted] »

eqmvii wrote: post #9

If only there were a way to stop the surprise billing once it starts. A friend created an AWS account with a new email address for a one-off side project, and wound up locked out of both the email account and the AWS account. But AWS has the credit card, so a 25 cent mystery charge appears every month. AWS support is completely useless despite years of attempts at escalation, and of course the credit card company can…

[deleted]

Re: Avoid Surprise Bills from AWS

#45

Post by benjaminwootton »

We are using a bunch of cloud services at the moment such as AWS, GCP, Snowflake, Databricks.

These are all fantastic and I’m glad that we have them, but at the end of the month it feels like gut punches when the bills roll in.

Between the infrastructure as code, the auto scaling and the weird credit based systems, it feels totally out of control even at micro scale.

If I ever held the budget for a large organisation again I wouldn’t sleep at night with the amount of financial risk.

Cloud cost control should definetly be a growing demand in the future.

Re: Avoid Surprise Bills from AWS

#46

Post by FpUser »

I dropped AWS like a hot potato once the alternative solution for hosting large media files became feasible. I was sick of their bills.

And now with dedicated servers / storage / decent bandwidth so affordable it would take a tectonic event for me to go anywhere near cloudy stuff for any service. Well I did some Azure because client required it but that is their money - their problem.

Re: Avoid Surprise Bills from AWS

#47

Post by SavantIdiot »

AWS offers alarms and actions that will stop or terminate your service based on budget thresholds to solve exactly this problem. Why aren't these sufficient?

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitori...

It's literally the first thing I do when spinning up an instance in case I have a bug or go viral (never happened).

Re: Avoid Surprise Bills from AWS

#48

Post by rustc »

stopagephobia wrote: post #11
echelon wrote: post #5

How much does a domain name like "begin.com" cost, and how do you get a good domain / brand name for your startup (without calling it "PurpleKerfuffle" or something unregistered)? Is there a market for this? A strategy? I'm trying to get something good, but I keep getting back figures in the millions of dollars. Even ".io" domains are $100k. It's ridiculous. Am I doing something wrong?

Some of us People of Age remember when getting a good domain was easy before squatters :) And yes its hard now. In real life you can have the same business name in two different business areas as long as it doesn't cause confusion. I think we should get rid of domains all the way, I should be able to register any text and make it DNS resolve. Only answer for having squatters is to make any "domain" buyable so they ca…

> I think we should get rid of domains all the way, I should be able to register any text and make it DNS resolve.

> Only answer for having squatters is to make any "domain" buyable so they can't get all the good ones.

How's that any different from the current domain name system? There will still be only one owner of the text "google" or "begin".

Re: Avoid Surprise Bills from AWS

#49

Post by Havoc »

sebhook wrote: post #29
Havoc wrote: post #7

Somewhat surprised none of the major clouds off true sandboxed learning environments as a competitive advantage. i.e. We will not charge you more than $100 no matter what. Sure that doesn't work for enterprise stuff that has to be online, but there is a big market for people that can swallow $100 accidents but not 15k. And whoever offers that first will attract the cautious crowd. I've got friends that point blank re…

Google Cloud does this with new trial accounts, there's a very explicit step between free and paid services.

>Google Cloud does this with new trial accounts

I've already got an account that has used free credits. So me creating another account to utilise the free allowance again would presumably be not OK

Re: Avoid Surprise Bills from AWS

#50

Post by slownews45 »

ed25519FUUU wrote: post #28

I got a very surprising bill from GCP. I used bigquery to query the google public patent database[1]. I thought I was using enough predicates for it to effectively be a point query (using patent ID, etc). Turns out each single query was a full table scan of the 4TB dataset and cost about $5 each! I luckily stopped after 4 queries once my curiosity was satisfied, but I could have easily spent hundreds of dollars. It w…

They should have just billed you - they reversed the charges (for your own issue) and you aren't happy.

I think folks are used to being pretty catered to.

And yes, being able to play with 4TB databases in the cloud and huge GPU instances is a "liability" - you pay for what you use.

Google actually gives you a lot of data about jobs folks are running - check out

https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/information-schema-jo...

and total bytes processed if you want to do estimates of a per job cost etc.

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