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Serverless Horrors

serverlesshorrors.com

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Re: Serverless Horrors

#231

Post by wutwutwat »

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…

You had a credit card with not only a $100k+ limit, but allowed a single $100k transaction on it?

I call bullshit

Re: Serverless Horrors

#232

Post by ndsipa_pomu »

tetromino_ wrote: post #194
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.

If you sign up for electrical service for your house, and your shithead neighbor taps your line to power his array of grow lamps and crypto mining rigs, the power company will happily charge you thousands of dollars, and you will need a police report and traverse many layers of customer service hell to get a refund. If you sign up for water service and a tree root cracks your pipe, the water company will happily char…

The first instance is difficult to fix as crime can often involve substantial losses to people and often there's no route to getting a refund.

The broken water pipe should be covered by buildings insurance, but I can imagine it not being covered by some policies. Luckily a broken water pipe is likely not as expensive as not having e.g. third party liability protection if part of your roof falls off and hits someone.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#233

Post by tannedNerd »

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.

Or simply returns 503? Why would you go directly to destroying things??

Re: Serverless Horrors

#234

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

alberth wrote: post #221
wredcoll wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Actually, I described two different things.

The second one (the prescription one) may well be wrong. It’s total speculation, on my part.

The first one, though, I’m pretty sure is right.

I love the traditional debate tactic, where we find one part of an argument to be wrong, and use that, to say the other part is, too.

It’s no matter. I’m done here, anyway, and yield to you. The fox ain’t worth the chase.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#235

Post by psychoslave »

tetromino_ wrote: post #194
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.

If you sign up for electrical service for your house, and your shithead neighbor taps your line to power his array of grow lamps and crypto mining rigs, the power company will happily charge you thousands of dollars, and you will need a police report and traverse many layers of customer service hell to get a refund. If you sign up for water service and a tree root cracks your pipe, the water company will happily char…

I don't know in US, but having limits on how much electricity a house is able to take from the gride is absolutely something in some countries out there.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#236

Post by psychoslave »

Bluecobra wrote: post #133
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.

When I am playing around in the cloud I am super paranoid about charges, so I end up locking the ACLs to only permit traffic to my home IP. It’s too bad that they don’t have a better built in way of making sandbox labs. When I was doing cloud training with A Cloud Guru, it would generate a whole global AWS instance that would only last for 30 minutes.

Why don't you run locally?

Re: Serverless Horrors

#237

Post by remus »

sgarland wrote: post #120
hvb2 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't think this happens on prem? Servers running an application that is no longer used? Sure they're probably VMs but their cost isn't 0 either

With that model, your cost doesn't change, though. When/if you find you need more resources, you can (if you haven't been doing so) audit existing applications to clear out cruft before you purchase more hardware.

That's the equivalent of saying "just audit your cloud usage and remove stuff that's no longer used".

Re: Serverless Horrors

#238

Post by pixl97 »

tetromino_ wrote: post #194
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.

If you sign up for electrical service for your house, and your shithead neighbor taps your line to power his array of grow lamps and crypto mining rigs, the power company will happily charge you thousands of dollars, and you will need a police report and traverse many layers of customer service hell to get a refund. If you sign up for water service and a tree root cracks your pipe, the water company will happily char…

You're right, but even if I cut the water pipe right after the meter and run it for a month I might get a few thousand dollar charge.

You can ring up tens of thousands+ overnight with AWS. The scale of potential damages is nowhere even close.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#239

Post by estimator7292 »

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.

I mean, would you rather have a $10k build or have your server forcefully shut down after you hit $1k in three days?

One of those things is more important to different types of business. In some situations, any downtime at all is worth thousands per hour. In others, the service staying online is only worth hundreds of dollars a week.

So yes, the solution is as simple as giving the user hard spend caps that they can configure. I'd also set the default limits low for new accounts with a giant, obnoxious, flashing red popover that you cannot dismiss until you configure your limits.

However, this would generate less profit for Amazon et al. They have certainly run this calculation and decided they'd earn more money from careless businesses than they'd gain in goodwill. And we all know that goodwill has zero value to companies at FAANG scale. There's absolutely no chance that they haven't considered this. It's partially implemented and an incredibly obvious solution that everyone has been begging for since cloud computing became a thing. The only reason they haven't implemented this is purely greed and malice.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#240

Post by zahlman »

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.

In the "no-code" system, the end user does not write code. In the "serverless" system, the end user does connect to a server.

It doesn't just "have" servers; they aren't a hidden implementation detail. Connecting to a website is an instrumental part of using the software.

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