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Serverless Horrors

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Re: Serverless Horrors

#261
post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not everything on AWS is a Web app

TCP session close? Don't reply back the UDP response? Stop scheduling time on the satellite transceiver for that account?

Re: Serverless Horrors

#262

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…

There is no reason that cloud providers shouldn't be able to set up the same kind of billing options that advertisers have had access to for years. In Google and Meta ads I can set up multiple campaigns and give each campaign a budget. When that budget gets hit, those ads stop showing. Why would it be unreasonable to expect the same from AWS?

Re: Serverless Horrors

#263
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Putting stuff on the internet is dangerous, but the absence of hard caps is a choice and it just looks like another massive tech company optimizing for their own benefit. Another example of this is smartphone games for children, it's easier for a child to spend $2,000 then it is for a parent to enforce a $20/month spending limit.

Are you really comparing a software developer provisioning an online service to a child buying tokens for loot boxes?

Re: Serverless Horrors

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

What would the would “tier” mean here? There is a US tax bracket (tier) where no tax is due on long-term capital gains. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong when I pay long-term capital gains.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#265

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.

Yes. They said it was free then they surprise charge you $100k. That’s an insane amount of both money and stress. You’re at Amazon’s mercy if they will or will not refund it. And while this is in process you’re wondering if your entire financial future is ruined.

I have never in 8 years of being in the AWS ecosystem and reading forums and Reddits on the internet had anyone report that AWS wouldn’t refund their money.

If you go over your budget with AWS, what should AWS do automatically? Delete your objects from S3? Terminate your databases and EC2 instances? Besides, billing data collection doesn’t happen anywhere near realtime, consider it a fire hose of streaming data that is captured asynchronously.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#266
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Putting stuff on the internet is dangerous, but the absence of hard caps is a choice and it just looks like another massive tech company optimizing for their own benefit. Another example of this is smartphone games for children, it's easier for a child to spend $2,000 then it is for a parent to enforce a $20/month spending limit.

Are you really comparing a software developer provisioning an online service to a child buying tokens for loot boxes?

More the "dark pattern" of empowering unlimited spending and then what keeps on unfolding from it.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#267

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 then charged me one hundred thousand dollars

> as in how am I going to pay it?

Really?

Amazon charged your card for $100,000 and your bank allowed it?

You're filthy rich by most people's standard, and you were able to pay it.

Amazon was operating in such a good faith that they ate the computational cost you spent. And you hate them for this to this day...

Re: Serverless Horrors

#268

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.

You are a bit naive. They are making a ton of money with this dark pattern. As others have said Free-to-100K is not in the most generous realm of expectations. Its also why they have been doing the refunds as long as AWS has been a thing. They know it will not hold up in court. Not a month goes by without some HN story about something like this post.

They do this and make it easy to get a refund because for every demo account that does it some bigger account accidentally gets billed 10K and they have to pay for it. They have skin in the game and cannot risk their account being down for any time period.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution is simple: budget caps.

Yes and no. 100% accurate billing is not available in realtime, so it's entirely possible that you have reached and exceeded your cap by the time it has been detected. Having said that, within AWS there are the concepts of "budget" and "budget action" whereby you can modify an IAM role to deny costly actions. When I was doing AWS consulting, I had a customer who was concerned about Bedrock costs, and it was trivial t…

The circuit breaker doesn’t need to be 100% accurate. The detection just needs to be quick enough that the excess operating cost incurred by the delay is negligible for Amazon. That shouldn’t really be rocket science.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#270

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.”

That would get caught during the pre-peak stress testing.

You do do stress testing ahead of peak season, right?

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