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I Followed the Official AWS Amplify Guide and Was Charged $1,100

elliott-king.github.io

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Re: I Followed the Official AWS Amplify Guide and Was Charged $1,100

#261

Post by fallingsquirrel »

exhilaration wrote: post #212
modernerd wrote: post #30

"Billing alerts" are a joke, give us hard spend limits. Then offer a way to set those limits during onboarding. Building a business on blank cheques and accidental spends is shady. It's also a large barrier to adoption. The more times devs see reports like, "I tried [random 20-minute tutorial] and woke up to a bill for my life's savings and luckily support waived the fee this one time but next time they're coming for…

It's been mentioned several time in HN comments that the AWS billing code is a giant pile of spaghetti and there is generally a lot of fear around making big changes to it. That's been one of the more interesting inside baseball facts I've learned here.

And yet somehow every time they launch a new product they have no problem adding it to their billing code.

Re: I Followed the Official AWS Amplify Guide and Was Charged $1,100

#262

Post by sigseg1v »

Terretta wrote: post #253
traceroute66 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hard spend limits are an anti-feature for enterprise customers Yada yada yada, that's the same old excuse the cloud providers trot out. Now, forgive me for my clearly Nobel Prize winning levels of intellect when I point out the following... Number one: You would not have to turn on the hard spend limit if such functionality were to be provided. Number two: You could enable customers to set up hard limits IN CONJUNC…

There's no way to implement a hard limit without getting in the middle of your system in ways that (a) alter the system design, (b) in ways you cannot correct for, and (c) not for the better.

In my experience every AWS service I've worked with has an API to destroy the resource, eg destroy RDS instance without backup, terminate EC2, etc. I want it to irrecoverably destroy everything in my account when it hits the limit, no questions asked.

Re: I Followed the Official AWS Amplify Guide and Was Charged $1,100

#263

Post by fallingsquirrel »

Terretta wrote: post #253
traceroute66 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hard spend limits are an anti-feature for enterprise customers Yada yada yada, that's the same old excuse the cloud providers trot out. Now, forgive me for my clearly Nobel Prize winning levels of intellect when I point out the following... Number one: You would not have to turn on the hard spend limit if such functionality were to be provided. Number two: You could enable customers to set up hard limits IN CONJUNC…

There's no way to implement a hard limit without getting in the middle of your system in ways that (a) alter the system design, (b) in ways you cannot correct for, and (c) not for the better.

Of course there is. If someone hits their spending limit, asynchronously shut off the services (using the same API call that your customers can use, so no need to alter the system).

Then apply the hard limit in the billing code. If it took a minute or two to shut off all the instances, maybe the customer's bill should have been $1.001M instead of $1M, but cap the bill to $1M anyway. Given their profit margins of x,000% I think they can afford the lost pennies.

Re: I Followed the Official AWS Amplify Guide and Was Charged $1,100

#264

Post by scott_w »

lucianbr wrote: post #148
lukeramsden wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Do you think that this is trivial at AWS scale? What do you do when people hit their hard spend limits, start shutting down their EC2 instances and deleting their data? I can see the argument that just because its "hard" doesn't mean they shouldn't do it, but it's disingenuous to say they're shady because they don't.

> Do you think that this is trivial at AWS scale? What a ridiculous point. AWS achieves non-trivial things at scale all the time, and brag about it too. So many smart engineers with high salaries and they can't figure out a solution like "shut down instances so costs don't continue to grow, but keep the data so nothing critical is lost, at least for a limited time"? Disingenuous is what you are writing - oh no, it's…

> What a ridiculous point. AWS achieves non-trivial things at scale all the time, and brag about it too.

Many companies achieve non-trivial things at scale. Pretty much every good engineer I speak to will list out all the incredibly challenging thing they did. And follow it up with "however, this component in Billing is 100x more difficult than that!"

I've worked in Billing and I'd say a huge number of issues come from the business logic. When you add a feature after-the-fact, you'll find a lot of technical and business blockers that prevent you doing the most obvious path. I strongly suspect AWS realised they passed this point of no return some time ago and now the effort to implement it vastly outweighs any return they'd ever hope to see.

And, let's be honest, there will be no possible implementation of this that will satisfy even a significant minority of the people demanding this feature. Everyone things they're saying the same thing but the second you dig into the detail and the use-case, everyone will expect something slightly (but critically) different.

Re: I Followed the Official AWS Amplify Guide and Was Charged $1,100

#265

Post by lucianbr »

scott_w wrote: post #264
lucianbr wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you think that this is trivial at AWS scale? What a ridiculous point. AWS achieves non-trivial things at scale all the time, and brag about it too. So many smart engineers with high salaries and they can't figure out a solution like "shut down instances so costs don't continue to grow, but keep the data so nothing critical is lost, at least for a limited time"? Disingenuous is what you are writing - oh no, it's…

> What a ridiculous point. AWS achieves non-trivial things at scale all the time, and brag about it too. Many companies achieve non-trivial things at scale. Pretty much every good engineer I speak to will list out all the incredibly challenging thing they did. And follow it up with "however, this component in Billing is 100x more difficult than that!" I've worked in Billing and I'd say a huge number of issues come fr…

> "however, this component in Billing is 100x more difficult than that!"

Simply claiming this does not make it true. Anyway, the original claim was simply that it is not trivial. This is what is known as moving the goalposts, look it up.

> let's be honest, there will be no possible implementation of this

Prefixing some assertion with "let's be honest" does not prove it or even support it in any way. If you don't have any actual supporting arguments, there's nothing to discuss, to be honest.

Re: I Followed the Official AWS Amplify Guide and Was Charged $1,100

#266

Post by sigseg1v »

kristiandupont wrote: post #201
spacebanana7 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The accounting teams of many orgs would want this feature to be enabled, but the tech teams wouldn't. Asking AWS not to add this feature means the tech teams win the debate before it starts.

That seems like a very hypothetical problem you are solving there..

I feel pain just reading this because I know where that guy is coming from; at many orgs as soon as some stupid thing is available it gets mandated by people who have no idea how it works or what impacts it will have, all the time. If it was just as simple as not enabling the stupid option surely we could just not ena...

Excuse me for a minute, I have to go reset my password that expires every 10 days and can not match any previous password and enter my enterprise mandated sms 2fa because authenticator scary -- woops my SharePoint session expired after 120 seconds of inactivity let me just redo that -- oh what's that my corporate vpn disconnected because I don't have the mandatory patches applied, let me just restart -- Woah would you look at that my network interface doesn't work anymore after that update -- yes yes I'm sorry I know my activity light on MS Teams turned yellow for 5 minutes I'm working on it, just gotta do these other 12 steps so I can reset my password to -- oh look it's time to fill out the monthly company values survey, what's that, it's due by end of day?

Re: I Followed the Official AWS Amplify Guide and Was Charged $1,100

#267

Post by lucianbr »

cdchn wrote: post #237
Kwpolska wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've had two decades to figure it out. For EC2, they could shut down the instance but keep storage and public IPs. It shouldn't be too hard to estimate when the instance has to be stopped to end up with charges below the hard limit.

Now multiply the logic required by multiple cost factors across hundreds of services.

Imagine how impossible it is to actually build those services, with all their logic, if just this added logic is impossible :)

Re: I Followed the Official AWS Amplify Guide and Was Charged $1,100

#268

Post by scott_w »

lucianbr wrote: post #265
scott_w wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What a ridiculous point. AWS achieves non-trivial things at scale all the time, and brag about it too. Many companies achieve non-trivial things at scale. Pretty much every good engineer I speak to will list out all the incredibly challenging thing they did. And follow it up with "however, this component in Billing is 100x more difficult than that!" I've worked in Billing and I'd say a huge number of issues come fr…

> "however, this component in Billing is 100x more difficult than that!" Simply claiming this does not make it true. Anyway, the original claim was simply that it is not trivial. This is what is known as moving the goalposts, look it up. > let's be honest, there will be no possible implementation of this Prefixing some assertion with "let's be honest" does not prove it or even support it in any way. If you don't have…

> Simply claiming this does not make it true.

The people "claiming" this actually worked on it. I read a post from HN just yesterday talking about the complexities of billing. Look it up.

> If you don't have any actual supporting arguments

You can read other responses in this post. Look it up.

Re: I Followed the Official AWS Amplify Guide and Was Charged $1,100

#269

Post by pvillano »

exhilaration wrote: post #212
modernerd wrote: post #30

"Billing alerts" are a joke, give us hard spend limits. Then offer a way to set those limits during onboarding. Building a business on blank cheques and accidental spends is shady. It's also a large barrier to adoption. The more times devs see reports like, "I tried [random 20-minute tutorial] and woke up to a bill for my life's savings and luckily support waived the fee this one time but next time they're coming for…

It's been mentioned several time in HN comments that the AWS billing code is a giant pile of spaghetti and there is generally a lot of fear around making big changes to it. That's been one of the more interesting inside baseball facts I've learned here.

If there was a lawsuit, change in regulation, request from an enterprise customer, or doing so MADE THEM MORE MONEY it would be fixed in a week.

Re: I Followed the Official AWS Amplify Guide and Was Charged $1,100

#270

Post by thayne »

calgoo wrote: post #47
ElFitz wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there even a simple way of listing all the existing resources in an AWS account? I’ve always had to check service by service, region by region. It’s tedious and error-prone.

Cost and usage reports will show you what is being paid for. Then there are resources that won’t show up on that so I have used aws:config to pull down other resource lists and finally you can cross both reports to more less find everything.

Cost and Usage reports tells you what services you are paying for and which regions they are in, but doesn't give you a list of resources themselves.
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