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Serverless Horrors

serverlesshorrors.com

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271–280 of 503 posts

Re: Serverless Horrors

#271

Post by JustExAWS »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #156
VectorLock wrote: post #144

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.

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 situat…

AWS has been very liberal about refunds and credits because of mistakes since 2006.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#272

Post by com2kid »

thousand_bats wrote: post #16
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…

> I thought this would be about the horrors of hosting/developing/debugging on “Serverless” but it’s about pricing over-runs. Agreed about that. I was hired onto a team that inherited a large AWS Lambda backend and the opacity of the underlying platform (which is the value proposition of serverless!) has made it very painful when the going gets tough and you find bugs in your system down close to that layer (in our c…

Every time I've done a cost benefit analysis of AWS Lambda vs running a tiny machine 24/7 to handle things, the math has come out in favor of just paying to keep a machine on all the time and spinning up more instances as load increase.

There are some workloads that are suitable for lambda but they are very rare compared to the # of people who just shove REST APIs on lambda "in case they need to scale."

Re: Serverless Horrors

#273

Post by JustExAWS »

bapak wrote: post #246
VectorLock wrote: post #144

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.

You wake up to a bill of one hundred thousand dollars and now it's up to you to dispute it. I think hating them for it is very fair.

Really? You’re not “disputing it”. You were charged fair and square. You send an email to their customer support and they say “no problem” and help you prevent it in the future.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#274

Post by gbear605 »

mlhpdx wrote: post #209
jsheard wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Protect yourself how? Most cloud providers don't support any way to immediately abort spending if things get out of hand, and when running a public-facing service there are always variables you can't control. Even if you rig up your own spending watchdog which polls the clouds billing APIs, you're still at the mercy of however long it takes for the cloud to reconcile your spending, which often takes hours or even day…

Yes, they do. You create resources and you delete resources and if you care about cost you creat alarms and tie them to scripts that automatically delete resources. It’s basic stuff.

Those alarms can take hours to cut in, because AWS does not report costs in real time

Re: Serverless Horrors

#275

Post by JustExAWS »

McGlockenshire wrote: post #226
tekno45 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, you as a developer should know something about how the service works before you use it. I first opened the AWS console in 2016 and by then I had read about the possible gotchas.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#276

Post by paulddraper »

coredog64 wrote: post #241
herpdyderp wrote: post #207

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…

What about 90% accurate?

Re: Serverless Horrors

#277

Post by JustExAWS »

citizenpaul wrote: post #268
VectorLock wrote: post #144

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.

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 dem…

I have had a “larger account” when I was at startup and was able to ask for a refund for a business.

As I asked before, if what is causing overages is not web requests but storage should they just delete everything?

Re: Serverless Horrors

#278

Post by scarface_74 »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #168
VectorLock wrote: post #144

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.

As the saying goes, when you owe the bank $100 you've got a problem, when you owe the bank $100k the bank has a problem... On serverless, I can enter numbers in a calculator and guess that running my little toy demo app on AWS will cost between $1 and $100. Getting hit with a huge $1000 bill and a refusal to refund the charges (and revocation of my Prime account and a lifetime ban from AWS and cancellation of any oth…

You haven’t been able to use your Amazon retail account to open an AWS account for years. You don’t “beg”. You just send them an email and they say “yes”.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#279

Post by cjbgkagh »

JustExAWS wrote: post #271
cjbgkagh wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 situat…

AWS has been very liberal about refunds and credits because of mistakes since 2006.

That was also true for returned goods - though admittedly scammers did ruin that for everyone.

I'd rather they didn't have the option, I'd rather not stake my financial future on the good graces of Amazon.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#280

Post by maxbond »

the__alchemist wrote: post #15

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

Bit of a nit pick but this is a pet peeve of mine.

Creating a new word for a more specific category is never Orwellian. The project in 1984 was to create a language which was less expressive. They were destroying words describing fine distinctions and replacing them with words that elided those distinctions. Creating a new word to highlight a distinction is the opposite.

There's definitely criticisms to be made of the term serverless and how it obscures the role of servers, but Orwellian is not the correct category. Maybe we could say such services run on servelets to describe how they're "lighter" in some sense but still servers.

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