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Serverless Horrors

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Re: Serverless Horrors

#141

Post by appreciatorBus »

bee_rider wrote: post #122
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’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…

Yeah I get it. It just irks that it's something I'd like to spend more time with and learn, but at every corner I feel like I'm exposing myself. For what I have done w/AWS & GCP so far with personal accounts, complete deletion of all resources & images would be annoying to be sure, but still preferable to unlimited liability. Ofc most companies using it won't be in that boat so IDK.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#142

Post by JackSlateur »

JackSlateur wrote: post #93
JJMcJ wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an example of why cloud hosting is so scary. Yes, Amazon, and I assume Azure and Google's cloud and others, "usually" refund the money. But I don't want to be forced into bankruptcy because my five visitor a week demo project suddenly becomes the target of a DDOS for no reason at all and the hosting company decides this isn't a "usually" so please send the wire transfer.

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

To all of those who say "this is not limit, only notifications": yes, notifications that can trigger whatever you want, including a shutdown of whatever you have

Is this a perfect solution: no Is this still a solution: yes

Re: Serverless Horrors

#143

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

alberth wrote: post #136
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"…

I’m fairly certain that’s incorrect . Businesses are only taxed on actual revenue earned. What you decide to charge—whether $100, $50, or even giving it away for free—is purely a business decision, not a tax one. — This is different from a nonprofit donation scenario though. For example, if your service normally costs $X but you choose to provide it for free (or at a discount) as a donation to a non-profit, you can t…

You may be right (this is not my forte), but the invoice is real. So is the forgiveness. I don’t see how the IRS can legitimately deny a write-off.

I’ve heard stories like this, many times, from businesses people.

They certainly believe in the pattern.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#144

Post by VectorLock »

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…

Amazon refunded you and you hate them for it?

I think one of the reasons I appreciate AWS so much is that any time there has been snafu that led to a huge bill like this they've made it pretty painless to get a refund- just like you experienced.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#145

Post by VectorLock »

Xelbair wrote: post #123
sbarre wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Its not expensive for them, its expensive for their customers. If you went over your spending limit and they deleted all your shit, people would be absolutely apoplectic. Instead they make you file a relatively painless ticket and explain why you accidentally went over what you wanted to spend. This is an engineering trade-off they made to make things less painful for their customers.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#146

Post by Cpoll »

mortsnort wrote: post #132
paseante wrote: post #22

Yeah I also left my website hosted on Google Cloud because costs popped from everywhere, and there is basically no built-in functionality to limit them. So I didn't really slept relaxed (I actually slept great, but I hope you get the point) knowing that a bug could cost me... who knows how much. Actually, as the website of OP says, for spending control you have budget notifications and with that you can disable the b…

You can write Google cloud functions to disable your credit card when certain thresholds are met pretty easily, but it's unethical that this isn't just a toggle somewhere in settings.

Does that actually stop the spend immediately? If not, you're still on the hook for the bill. I suppose you can walk away and let them try to come after you, but that wouldn't work for a company.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#147

Post by VectorLock »

franktankbank wrote: post #128
mikeocool wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yes, a sign of resilient architecture is to shut down when it encounters some stress.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#148

Post by hk1337 »

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…

It’s interesting because on the posted site there’s only 2 AWS posts on the main page and they’re rather mild compared to the other posts using google, vercel, cloudformation, etc.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#149

Post by hamandcheese »

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…

> The only conclusion I can come to is that these services are simply not made for small experimental projects, yet I also don’t know any other way to learn the services except by setting up toy projects

Yeah, I'm sure this is it. There is no way that feature is worth the investment when it only helps them sell to... broke individuals? (no offense. Most individuals are broke compared to AWS's target customer).

Re: Serverless Horrors

#150

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

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…

Given how complicated configuring AWS is, surely there could be some middle ground between stop all running services and delete every byte of data. The former is surely what the typical low spend account would desire.
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