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Serverless Horrors

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Re: Serverless Horrors

#151

Post by __loam »

franktankbank wrote: post #129
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"…

Smells like fraud.

Yeah man the whole industry is like that. OpenAI gets to say they raised X billion dollars and update their valuation but they don't mention that it's all cloud compute credits from a gigantic Corp that owns a huge amount of the business. They claim to be a non-profit to do the research then when they've looted the commons, they switch to for profit to pay out the investors. There's shit like this throughout the industry.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#152

Post by StevenWaterman »

Spivak wrote: post #138
the__alchemist wrote: post #15

"Serverless" is a an Orwellian name for a server-based system!

But your so called "no-code" system runs on code. Checkmate atheists. There becomes a point where being mad that the specific flavor of PaaS termed serverless achtually has severs is just finding a thing to be mad at.

and your wireless modem has wires

Re: Serverless Horrors

#153

Post by Vvector »

VectorLock wrote: post #144
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.

If it is a "free tier", Amazon should halt the application when it exceeds quota. Moving the account to a paid tier and charging $100k is not the right thing to do.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#154

Post by ldoughty »

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...

I work in this space regularly. There can be a delay of 2-3 days from the event to charge. Seems some services report faster than others. But this means by the time you get a billing alert it has been ongoing for hours if not days.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#155

Post by bratwurst3000 »

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…

allways set cost alarm and max spending. AWS has great tools to controll costs. You could have blocked this with good config but I understand its confusing and not super apparent. IMHO there should be a pop up or sth asking " you want to stop the instance the moment it costs anything?"

its so easy to get billed a ridicules amount if money

Re: Serverless Horrors

#156

Post by cjbgkagh »

VectorLock wrote: post #144
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.

Amazon is currently permissive which splits opposition, this won’t always be the case, they will tighten the screws eventually as they have done in the past in other areas. Amazon because it’s so broadly used undermines the utility of chargebacks, you can do it but it’ll be a real hassle to not be able to use Amazon for shopping. A lot of people will just eat the costs, is Amazon knows this they will force the situation more often because it’ll make them more money.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#157

Post by yowlingcat »

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…

This isn't a great answer to the overall issue (which I agree is a ridiculous dark pattern), but I've used Privacy.com cards for personal projects to hard spend at a card level so it just declines if it passes some threshold on a daily/weekly/monthly/lifetime basis. At work, I do the same thing with corporate cards to ensure the same controls are in place.

Now, as to why they're applying the dark pattern - cynically, I wonder if that's the dark side of usage/volume based pricing. Once revenue gets big enough, any hit to usage (even if it's usage that would be terminated if the user could figure out how) ends up being a metric that is optimized against at a corporate level.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#159

Post by motorest »

bingabingabinga wrote: post #130
motorest wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

For you to put together this sort of argument with a straight face, you need to have little to no understanding of how the internet in general, services and web apps work. Good luck arguing your case with a judge.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#160

Post by mdaniel »

luxuryballs wrote: post #139

there should be some kind of insurance for bugs that introduce unusually expensive usage

I believe any such policy would need its premiums based on the services used (and likely the qualifications of the staff) since, unlike rebuilding a house, the financial risk is almost unlimited with out of control cloud spend

It reminds me of the Citi(?) employee who typed the wrong decimal place in a trade: computers make everything so easy!

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