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Serverless Horrors

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Re: Serverless Horrors

#71

Post by hvb2 »

rwmj wrote: post #25
solatic wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Your buckets should be private, with a security rule that they can only be accessed by your CDN provider, precisely to force the CDN to be used.

Why isn't that the default? I'm glad I use a Hetzner VPS. I pay about EUR 5 monthly, and never have to worry about unexpected bills.

Because just using a cdn without proper caching headers is just another service you're paying for without any savings.

The real question is if they considered caching and thus configured it appropriately. If you don't, you're telling everyone you want every request to go to origin

Re: Serverless Horrors

#72

Post by Dunedan »

sherburt3 wrote: post #7
joshstrange wrote: post #4

I thought this would be about the horrors of hosting/developing/debugging on “Serverless” but it’s about pricing over-runs. I scrolled aimlessly through the site ignoring most posts (bandwidth usage bills aren’t super interesting) but I did see this one: https://medium.com/@maciej.pocwierz/how-an-empty-s3-bucket-c... About how you make unauth’d API calls to an s3 bucket you don’t own to run up the costs. That was a n…

I believe they changed that shortly after that blog post went viral: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/08/amazon-s3...

I raised that exact same issue to AWS in ~2015 and even though we had an Enterprise support plan, AWS response was basically: well, you problem.

We then ended up deleting the S3 bucket entirely, as that appeared to be the only way to get rid of the charges, only for AWS to come back to use a few weeks later telling us there are charges for an S3 bucket we previously owned. After explaining to them (again) that this way our only option to get rid of the charges, we never heard back.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#73

Post by jsheard »

ctvo wrote: post #68
phoenixhaber wrote: post #43

When I was learning to program through a bootcamp I spun up an elastic beanstalk instance that was free but required a credit card to prove your identity. No problem that makes sense - it's an easy way to prove authentication as a bot can't spam a credit card (or else it would be financial fraud and most likely a felony). Amazon then charged me one hundred thousand dollars as the server was hit by bot spam. I had the…

I took a workshop class and was told to setup a track saw. The course didn't bother explaining how to utilize it properly or protect yourself. I ended up losing a finger. I truly hate Stanley Tools with a passion and if I ever need to use another track saw, I'll use someone else.

Protect yourself how? Most cloud providers don't support any way to immediately abort spending if things get out of hand, and when running a public-facing service there are always variables you can't control.

Even if you rig up your own spending watchdog which polls the clouds billing APIs, you're still at the mercy of however long it takes for the cloud to reconcile your spending, which often takes hours or even days.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#74

Post by Galanwe »

ctvo wrote: post #68
phoenixhaber wrote: post #43

When I was learning to program through a bootcamp I spun up an elastic beanstalk instance that was free but required a credit card to prove your identity. No problem that makes sense - it's an easy way to prove authentication as a bot can't spam a credit card (or else it would be financial fraud and most likely a felony). Amazon then charged me one hundred thousand dollars as the server was hit by bot spam. I had the…

I took a workshop class and was told to setup a track saw. The course didn't bother explaining how to utilize it properly or protect yourself. I ended up losing a finger. I truly hate Stanley Tools with a passion and if I ever need to use another track saw, I'll use someone else.

> I ended up losing a finger

You forgot to mention Stanley Tools paid for the hospital bill.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#75

Post by delduca »

Couple years ago I was charged in USD 4K on Google Cloud after trying recursive cloud functions.

I told them that was a mistake and they forgot the debit, they just asked to no do again.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#77

Post by interloxia »

trcf22 wrote: post #2

After a quick check on Vercel stories, it seems all payments were discarded or mistakes in the first place. Does it really happen to really have to pay such a bill? Do you need to tweet about it to be reimbursed?

Someone at a community group I'm in messed up playing with Azure through their free for non-profits offering^. We were out about 1.2k€. Not huge but huge for us.

Encouraged by comments on HN over the years I had them ask support to kindly to wave it. After repeating the request a few times they eventually reduced their bill to So even without shaming on social media, But it probably depends. It's worth at least asking.

^The deal changed about six months ago.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#78

Post by thedanbob »

omnicognate wrote: post #38

It would help to round to the cent. With 3 digits to the right of the dot it's ambiguous whether it's a decimal point or a thousands separator, and the font and underline makes the comma vs dot distinction a bit unclear.

A number of the titles appear to have 69 or 420 cents added to the amount that appears in the story.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#79

Post by johnebgd »

We are building bare metal for our workloads… I don’t care if cloud is supposed to be cheaper because it never is. You can get a decent small business firewall to handle 10gbit fiber for $600 from unifi these days. Just another reason I’m glad I moved out of the Bay Area and nyc to a midwestern town for my company. I have a basement and can do rad things in my house to grow my business.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#80

Post by hamdingers »

ctvo wrote: post #68
phoenixhaber wrote: post #43

When I was learning to program through a bootcamp I spun up an elastic beanstalk instance that was free but required a credit card to prove your identity. No problem that makes sense - it's an easy way to prove authentication as a bot can't spam a credit card (or else it would be financial fraud and most likely a felony). Amazon then charged me one hundred thousand dollars as the server was hit by bot spam. I had the…

I took a workshop class and was told to setup a track saw. The course didn't bother explaining how to utilize it properly or protect yourself. I ended up losing a finger. I truly hate Stanley Tools with a passion and if I ever need to use another track saw, I'll use someone else.

This analogy would make sense if the saw lacked a basic and obvious safety feature (billing limits) because Stanley profited immensely from cutting your finger off.
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