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Serverless Horrors

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171–180 of 503 posts

Re: Serverless Horrors

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why would I apoplectic at Amazon if I set “turn my shit off after it has accrued $10 in charges” to TRUE and they actually followed what I asked them to do?

Re: Serverless Horrors

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They could add it as an optional limit. If it's on and is exceeded, stop everything. Surely the geniuses at Amazon (no they really are, I'm not joking) can handle it.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#173
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> But, I don’t think the idea of just stopping charging works. I'm sorry but this is complete bullshit. they can set a default limit of 1 trillion dollars and give us the option to drop it to $5. there's a good reason they won't do it, but it's not this bullshit claim that's always bandied about.

I hate how every time this issue mentioned everyone's response is that it would hurt the companies. Literally just make it an option. It's not that difficult for some of the smartest engineers in the world to implement it.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#174

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 irresponsible when they let people sign up for a unlimited credit.

At minimum they should provide hard billing caps.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#175

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…

[dead]

Re: Serverless Horrors

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If I ask Amazon to turn my lambdas off if I breach $500, and they turn my lambdas off when I breach $500, I won't be mad at them, I promise.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#177

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…

> But, I don’t think the idea of just stopping charging works.

You don't stop CHARGING. You stop providing the service that is accumulating charges in excess of what limit I set. And you give some short period of time to settle the bill, modify the service, etc. You can keep charging me, but provide a way to stop the unlimited accrual of charges beyond limits I want to set.

> No, I think cloud billing is just inherently complicated.

You're making it more complicated than it needs to be.

> The only reasonable interpretation of “emergency stop on all charges completely” would be to delete those images.

It's by far certainly not the 'only reasonable interpretation'.

"Stop all charges" is a red herring. No one is asking for a stop on charges. They want an option to stop/limit/cap the stuff that causes the charges.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#179

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's a free tier there should never have been a charge in the first place...

Re: Serverless Horrors

#180

The real serverless horror isn't the occasional mistake that leads to a single huge bill, it's the monthly creep. It's so easy to spin up a resource and leave it running. It's just a few bucks, right? I worked for a small venture-funded "cloud-first" company and our AWS bill was a sawtooth waveform. Every month the bill would creep up by a thousand bucks or so, until it hit $20k at which point the COO would notice an…

this is really the AWS business model - you can call it the "planet fitness" model if you prefer. Really easy to sign up and spend money, hard to conveniently stop paying the money.
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