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Serverless Horrors

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Re: Serverless Horrors

#121

Post by stressback »

I read a lot of the posts at the little blog here and, uh, every single one sounds like a complete amateur making a cloud configuration mistake. I haven't found one that is the provider's fault or the fault of "serverless"

I would be embarrassed to put my name on these posts admitting I can't handle my configs while blaming everyone but myself.

Serverless isn't a horror, serverlesshorrors poster. You are the horror. You suck at architecting efficient & secure systems using this technology, you suck at handling cloud spend, and you suck at taking responsibility when your "bug" causes a 10,000x discrepancy between your expected cost and your actual bill.

Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it sucks

Re: Serverless Horrors

#122

Post by bee_rider »

appreciatorBus wrote: post #102
JackSlateur wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have billing limits https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cost-management/latest/userguide...

These aren’t limits though, they are just budget notifications. What would be helpful, would be if when you set up your account there was a default limit – as in an actual limit, where all projects stop working once you go over it - of some sane amount like $5 or $50 or even $500. I have a handful of toy projects on AWS and Google cloud. On both I have budgets set up at $1 and $10, with notifications at 10% 50% and 9…

I’ve accidentally hit myself with a bigger than expected AWS bill (just $500 but as a student I didn’t really want to spend that much). So I get being annoyed with the pricing model.

But, I don’t think the idea of just stopping charging works. For example, I had some of their machine image thingies (AMI) on my account. They charged me less than a dollar a month, totally reasonable. The only reasonable interpretation of “emergency stop on all charges completely” would be to delete those images (as well as shutting down my $500 nodes). This would have been really annoying, I mean putting the images together took a couple hours.

And that’s just for me. With accounts that have multiple users—do you really delete all the disk images on a business’s account, because one of their employees used compute to hit their spend limit? No, I think cloud billing is just inherently complicated.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#123

Post by Xelbair »

sbarre wrote: post #114
appreciatorBus wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These aren’t limits though, they are just budget notifications. What would be helpful, would be if when you set up your account there was a default limit – as in an actual limit, where all projects stop working once you go over it - of some sane amount like $5 or $50 or even $500. I have a handful of toy projects on AWS and Google cloud. On both I have budgets set up at $1 and $10, with notifications at 10% 50% and 9…

I feel that the likely answer here is that instrumenting real-time spending limit monitoring and cut-off at GCP/AWS scale is Complicated/Expensive to do, so they choose to not do it. I suppose you could bake the limits into each service at deploy time, but that's still a lot of code to write to provide a good experience to a customer who is trying to not pay you money. Not saying this is a good thing, but this feels…

I don't care if it is expensive for them. I'm not running their business, I'm their customer - it is inconvenient for me.

And frankly any pay-as-you-go scheme should be regulated to have maximum spending limit setting. Not only in IT.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#124

Post by mikeocool »

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 had them refund the bill (as in how am I going to pay it?) but to this day I've hated Amazon with a passion

They refunded you $100k with few questions asked, and you hate them for it?

I’ve made a few expensive mistakes on AWS that were entirely my fault, and AWS has always refunded me for them.

I imagine if Amazon did implement “shut every down when I exceed my budget” there’d be a bunch of horror stories like “I got DDOSed and AWS shutdown all my EC2s and destroyed the data I accidentally wrote to ephemeral storage.”

Re: Serverless Horrors

#125

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

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…

These "refund after overcharge" things are not without benefit to the corporations.

They get a nice tax write-off.

It's couch-cushion change for them, but it adds up. They have whole armies of beancounters, dreaming this stuff up.

It's also the game behind those "coupons" you get, for outrageously-priced meds that aren't covered by insurance.

If they charge $1,000 for the medication, but give you a "special discount" for $90%, they get to write off $900.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#126

Post by Disposal8433 »

motorest wrote: post #96
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…

> 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. Is it just me or is this just a cheap excuse to grab a payment method from unsuspecting free-tier users?

[dead]

Re: Serverless Horrors

#127

Post by wiether »

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.

Buckets are private by default.

And it's getting harder and harder to make them public because of people misconfiguring them and then going public against AWS when they discover the bill.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#128

Post by franktankbank »

mikeocool wrote: post #124
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 had them refund the bill (as in how am I going to pay it?) but to this day I've hated Amazon with a passion They refunded you $100k with few questions asked, and you hate them for it? I’ve made a few expensive mistakes on AWS that were entirely my fault, and AWS has always refunded me for them. I imagine if Amazon did implement “shut every down when I exceed my budget” there’d be a bunch of horror stories like “I…

In what world is that not the preferable solution? Want to know if your shit is actually robust just set your cap and ddos yourself as the first test of you architecture.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#129

Post by franktankbank »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #125
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…

These "refund after overcharge" things are not without benefit to the corporations. They get a nice tax write-off. It's couch-cushion change for them, but it adds up. They have whole armies of beancounters, dreaming this stuff up. It's also the game behind those "coupons" you get, for outrageously-priced meds that aren't covered by insurance. If they charge $1,000 for the medication, but give you a "special discount"…

Smells like fraud.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#130

Post by bingabingabinga »

motorest wrote: post #101
1oooqooq wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"your honor, they provided the credit card to prove their identity for the free plan and now we want to collect 100k"

And then they pull out the invoice where they prove without any doubt that you actually used pay-per-use services and ran up a 100k bill because you failed to do any sort of configuration.

I didn't use them, some bots did. Sort it out with them.
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