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Serverless Horrors

serverlesshorrors.com

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Re: Serverless Horrors

#221

Post by alberth »

wredcoll wrote: post #203
alberth wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Businesses are only taxed on actual revenue earned. I don't want to go too far down the rabbit hole of hn speculation, but if another entity owes you 100k, and they go bankrupt, there absolutely are tax implications.

Agreed … but that is a different situation.

That is a lack of payment situation.

Revenue was still earned (and charged) … and since you never collected revenue then you don’t pay taxes.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#222

Post by clvx »

mlhpdx wrote: post #213
herpdyderp wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution is simple: budget caps.

Is it simple? So what happens when you hit the cap, does AWS delete the resources that are incurring the cost and destroy your app? Imagine the horror stories on Hacker News that would generate.

Yes, that’s exactly the expected behavior. It can alert if it’s closed to threshold. Very straightforward from my point of view.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#223

Post by jppope »

This is a weird take on an incredibly useful paradigm (serverless). One the one side, there are obviously precautions that all of these users could have taken to avoid these charges on the other hand its totally common to spin up a thing and forget about it or not do your due diligence. I totally feel for the people who have been hit with these chargers.

At the end of the day though the whole think feels like a carpenter shooting themselves in the foot with a nail gun then insisting that hammers are the only way to do things.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#224

Post by bogtog »

wredcoll wrote: post #203
alberth wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Businesses are only taxed on actual revenue earned. I don't want to go too far down the rabbit hole of hn speculation, but if another entity owes you 100k, and they go bankrupt, there absolutely are tax implications.

Would the tax implications not just be for whatever it costs on their end, regardless of what the customer was charged?

Re: Serverless Horrors

#225

Post by pixl97 »

rr808 wrote: post #198
acoustics wrote: post #188

The assignment of blame for misconfigured cloud infra or DOS attacks is so interesting to me. There don't seem to be many principles at play, it's all fluid and contingent. Customers demand frictionless tools for automatically spinning up a bunch of real-world hardware. If you put this in the hands of inexperienced people, they will mess up and end up with huge bills, and you take a reputational hit for demanding tho…

Maybe, but its a huge reason to use real servers instead of serverless.

I mean real servers get hit with things like bandwidth fees so it's not a 100% solution.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#226

Post by McGlockenshire »

tekno45 wrote: post #196
msh wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon is irresponsible when they let people sign up for a unlimited credit. At minimum they should provide hard billing caps.

putting stuff on the internet is dangerous. if you're not prepared to secure public endpoints stop creating them.

blaming the victim? stay classy.

intentionally allowing huge billing by default is scummy, period.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#227

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Serverless Horrors

#228

Post by pixl97 »

christophilus wrote: post #191
Vvector wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree, but I could also see how someone would complain about that: “Our e-commerce site was taken down by Amazon right on our biggest day of the year. They should have just moved us up to the next tier.”

Then let that be the non default option.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#229

Post by zahlman »

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…

> Imagine you create an empty, private AWS S3 bucket in a region of your preference. [...] As it turns out, one of the popular open-source tools had a default configuration to store their backups in S3. And, as a placeholder for a bucket name, they used… the same name that I used for my bucket.

What are the odds?

(Not a rhetorical question. I don't know how the choice of names works.)

Re: Serverless Horrors

#230

Post by mahirsaid »

Seem likes there are mistakes that were made on behalf of the users. The attackers found these mistakes and took advantage of them. i don't think "severless" is the problem.
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