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Accident Forgiveness

fly.io

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Re: Accident Forgiveness

#121

Post by tmnvix »

tptacek wrote: post #43
bitbasher wrote: post #38

There is a very obvious fix for surprise billing. Enforce a billing cap and terminate service if it's met. Even better if you send alerts when the cap is approaching. If I pay $39/month, a default cap should be $39 per-month. Otherwise, let me set a cap I am comfortable with. Surprise billing is never good for customers, only the business.

I promise, you are not the first person to have thought of this, and, believe it or not, there are reasons other than malice and avarice that cloud providers don't terminate service based on billing caps. Terminating service is a big deal. We agree completely about surprise billing.

My preferred option would be to have an optional billing cap that I can enable knowing full well that if it is exceeded the service would be terminated (obviously with notifications as that cap is approached). I could then apply this to simple hobby projects and such, while not having the risk of termination apply to more serious applications (though a 'soft cap' would be nice here so that I could still receive notifications as it approaches).

Re: Accident Forgiveness

#122

Post by smithcoin »

ctennis1 wrote: post #111

Google Cloud will not cut you a break unless you have an incredible about of pull. Even then, you won't get much of one.

I'm suffering for this now. They just erroneously charged me almost $4,000 out of nowhere because they decided to scan all of old container images for no reason and without notification. I have a support partner and everybody is just passing the buck around, it's super frustrating.

Re: Accident Forgiveness

#123

Post by maliker »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #36
paxys wrote: post #8

It's unfortunate that the solution to cloud pricing complexity that all providers are adopting is – add even more complexity on top. The number you see on your bill is increasingly calculated by running some black box algorithm on top of the billing events your resources generate. Was it accidental or not? What is a "weird" deployment vs a normal deployment? By what factor should the spikes on your billing graph be s…

Anyone else remember we had widely available and completely understandable options to rent everything from baseline web-hosting all the way up to private rack services for actual years before AWS came along and apparently all of that was forgotten, Warhammer 40K style? I've rented a VPS from a vendor for going on 20 years now (Holy fuck I'm old) and I've never once been surprised at the bill.

You know that book "JavaScript: The Good Parts"? There needs to be a similar one "AWS: just the good parts". It would probably talk about EC2 (VPS), S3 (cheap bulk storage), SES (emails), and that's about it. When folks get into the elastic-super-beanstalk-container-swarm-v0.3 products, that's when they really kill themselves on the bills.

That said, yes, just using a VPS vendor is the easy way to stick to the good parts.

Re: Accident Forgiveness

#124

Post by ShroudedNight »

rendall wrote: post #117
tptacek wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why isn't one of those providers roflstomping the other 3 (add OCI to the mix) with better pricing?

"roflstomping"¿ What does it mean?

A beligerent that so completely outclasses their opponent that they can inflict existentially threatening losses with so little effort that its expenditure is indistinguishable from normal overhead

Alternatively, when Stitches managed to ambush your level appropriate character alone in Duskwood

Re: Accident Forgiveness

#127

Post by tedunangst »

tptacek wrote: post #71

Y'all really, really want caps. We think that's a crazy feature. We don't want to do it. But I just had this conversation on a Slack with a bunch of friends at other companies and they were just as yell-y about this. There's a threshold of feedback at which I think you could get us to do some kind of cap thingo. I'm just saying. Yeesh.

Okay, so now that it's inevitable you add caps, can we wager on how long between rollout and the first front page "I told fly I wanted a service cap, but not like this!" post?

Re: Accident Forgiveness

#128

Post by zipmapfoldright »

paxys wrote: post #48
tptacek wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be what you would pay in the absence of competition. This is an incredibly competitive space.

Competition only matters for new contracts. Once you have picked a provider and made a big enough infrastructure investment, there's no realistic path to switch to someone else.

This is absolutely not true. Customers regularly shift spends in the >= 7-digit between cloud providers. Yes, it takes planning, and it takes many engineer-months of work, but it definitely happens.

And also factor in (1) the claim that most cloud growth is ahead of us, eg. moving large customers from on-prem to cloud, and (2) it would be terrible policy to try to charge existing customers more than new customers.

Re: Accident Forgiveness

#129

Post by mcbain »

bitbasher wrote: post #38

There is a very obvious fix for surprise billing. Enforce a billing cap and terminate service if it's met. Even better if you send alerts when the cap is approaching. If I pay $39/month, a default cap should be $39 per-month. Otherwise, let me set a cap I am comfortable with. Surprise billing is never good for customers, only the business.

It's easy for (say) AWS to terminate your EC2 instances. Do they also delete your DB backups? Delete your S3 buckets?

All of these incur costs. How hard a cap do you want?

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