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Tell HN: I DDoSed myself using CloudFront and Lambda Edge and got a $4.5k bill

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Re: Tell HN: I DDoSed myself using CloudFront and Lambda Edge and got a $4.5k bill

#71

Post by causi »

sh4rks wrote: post #35
causi wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference between his situation and yours is that you didn't create the charges. Legally you're not liable for something someone does while impersonating you, even if you walked around with your private key on a t-shirt. They may or may not be nice to him but for you they didn't have a choice.

I mean, for all we know it could have been him mining the bitcoins, with committing the private key by accident being the cover up story.

The legal burden of proof for that lies on Amazon, not him, at least in the US.

Re: Tell HN: I DDoSed myself using CloudFront and Lambda Edge and got a $4.5k bill

#72

Post by hoofhearted »

We're looking at going to a NextJS frontend setup soon and maybe Lambda for SSR... Would Netlify be a good use case to avoid situations like this and keep the hosting bill down? Netlify CMS really has our eye after chatting with the Plausible.io folks.

Re: Tell HN: I DDoSed myself using CloudFront and Lambda Edge and got a $4.5k bill

#73

Post by logifail »

rozenmd wrote: post #50
capableweb wrote: post #20

Off-topic maybe, but I'm very curious as it's hard to find hard numbers: > my usual bill is $200/month How many req/second are you serving? What kind of things are happening? It seems like the bills are outrageously expensive when it comes to various cloud services, as I'm personally hosting a service that does between 10-100 req/second on average during a month, and my monthly bill end up being closer to $40/month,…

I run 1.2 million uptime checks per week, my total AWS bill was $150/mo before I migrated to permanently running VMs - it's definitely doable without trying too hard.

> my total AWS bill was $150/mo before I migrated to permanently running VMs

I know I keep harping on about this, but [if you have a vague idea what you're doing] you can squeeze an awful lot out of a cheap VM.

I'm currently working on a project that we're deliberately prototyping using ultra-cheap VMs. If it takes off we know how to scale it up, if it doesn't the costs stay very very low.

Re: Tell HN: I DDoSed myself using CloudFront and Lambda Edge and got a $4.5k bill

#74

Post by sirwitti »

I'm very much on the boring technology side of things with respect to hosting.

40€ / month gets you a very powerful dedicated server that can easily handle millions of requests per day and performs incredibly well and can be managed easily.

If you also use containers you even get quite a bit of flexibility and agility.

To be honest I don't really understand the sentiment that developers can get away with not knowing basic sysadmin stuff and at the same time have to spend relevant amounts of time, energy and money to get up to speed with cloud solutions, k8s and so on.

But then again, I'm not one of the cool kids...

Re: Tell HN: I DDoSed myself using CloudFront and Lambda Edge and got a $4.5k bill

#75

Post by Keyframe »

sirwitti wrote: post #74

I'm very much on the boring technology side of things with respect to hosting. 40€ / month gets you a very powerful dedicated server that can easily handle millions of requests per day and performs incredibly well and can be managed easily. If you also use containers you even get quite a bit of flexibility and agility. To be honest I don't really understand the sentiment that developers can get away with not knowing…

Yeah, but how will you scale up your multi-dozen-users-at-the-same-time app easily then?

Re: Tell HN: I DDoSed myself using CloudFront and Lambda Edge and got a $4.5k bill

#76

Post by bombcar »

heretogetout wrote: post #70
bombcar wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly? Many people would enable it, forget about it, and footgun themselves on the other side. Perhaps AWS should have "personal/developer" accounts that have this enabled by default and continually warn you about it, whereas "company/enterprise" don't have them.

> Many people would enable it, forget about it, and footgun themselves on the other side. Yeah, but I figure as long as Amazon doesn't immediately remove stored data, the damage of the footgun would be minimal. Speaking for myself, of course, I'd rather have a short outage than an unexpected thousand dollar overnight expense. It seems so trivial that it's unclear why AWS would not implement this feature. The only exp…

Because the downside for a company isn't "oh it was off overnight" it's "we finally hit it big and made zero sales because AWS shut us off".

Given how easily they reverse the bills, I suspect that they have a policy of doing it (perhaps a few times per account, something to prevent abuse) because they really don't want to trigger the above scenario.

Re: Tell HN: I DDoSed myself using CloudFront and Lambda Edge and got a $4.5k bill

#77

Post by noasaservice »

logifail wrote: post #67
cjbgkagh wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like in real life, if you run out of money you have to stop doing things.

> Just like in real life, if you run out of money you have to stop doing things In real life when you hit your card's limit, your transactions get declined. Straight away. I had this last month in a supermarket after my (personal) checking account didn't have enough money to cover my purchase, I'd completely forgotten to transfer money from my business account. My bank wasn't prepared to let my account go overdrawn,…

A better analog to the store and Scamazon's implementation would be:

You put stuff in your cart.

You go through the register. You agree to "prevailing price".

No prices show up because they are "calculating".

You leave the store.

A day later, you're hit with a surprise bill that's 10-100x more than you though. A $100 transaction ends up being $1000-$10000.

There's no refunds.

The dispute procedure is to beg and hope they "let you ignore it".

Re: Tell HN: I DDoSed myself using CloudFront and Lambda Edge and got a $4.5k bill

#78

Post by rob_c »

Self-host and stop using the cloud, especially when you clearly don't know what you're doing.

> Now I am waiting on a response from AWS Support on these charges; maybe they can help me waive part of that.

Honestly why should they? They're very clear about their billing policy and pricing, the only reason they might is good PR/karma from yc posting...

Re: Tell HN: I DDoSed myself using CloudFront and Lambda Edge and got a $4.5k bill

#80

Post by Mo3 »

sirwitti wrote: post #74

I'm very much on the boring technology side of things with respect to hosting. 40€ / month gets you a very powerful dedicated server that can easily handle millions of requests per day and performs incredibly well and can be managed easily. If you also use containers you even get quite a bit of flexibility and agility. To be honest I don't really understand the sentiment that developers can get away with not knowing…

You're going to understand where the cool kids come from once your single dedicated server goes down or can't handle the load any more. As soon as you try to scale horizontally or become highly available and start to think about how to do it you end up falling into the same rabbit hole.

> If you also use containers you even get quite a bit of flexibility and agility.

Yeah... and then the only difference is between a single host and multiple hosts. Guess which one Kubernetes is for?

With all due respect and no offense intended, your perspective sounds a lot like "I've never attempted to scale so I can't understand the problems"

> can get away with not knowing basic sysadmin stuff

I promise you that the knowledge you need for your single dedicated server is also needed for k8s clusters, and I definitely can't imagine anyone who can maintain a k8s cluster but can't maintain a single linux host. It's more like that scaling horizontally comes with exponentially more difficult problems than what you're used to or have heard of.

Obviously the billing is an issue but that doesn't negate the whole concept. They should definitely implement better expense controls. A simple hard cap to activate if you want would fix this for good.

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