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Serverless Horrors

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281–290 of 503 posts

Re: Serverless Horrors

#281

Post by fritzo »

zahlman wrote: post #219

I don't understand why it should be called "serverless" when using cloud infrastructure. Fundamentally you're still creating software following a client-server model, and expecting a server to run somewhere so that your users' clients work. To me, "serverless" is when the end user downloads the software, and thereafter does not require an Internet connection to use it. Or at the very least, if the software uses an In…

It's like a company with no employees. There are still people performing services, but on temporary contracts.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#282

Post by rustc »

JustExAWS wrote: post #273
bapak wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And what if they don't say "no problem"? Like the Netlify case where they at first offered a reduced bill (which was still a lot) before the post got viral and the CEO stepped in.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#283

Post by dismalaf »

sokoloff wrote: post #264
dismalaf wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's an expectation when it comes to consumer goods, and even protection in most jurisdictions, that you can't simply charge someone for something they don't want. It's like dropping a Mercedes at someone's house then charging them for it when they never wanted or asked for it. Allowing a "free" tier to run up so much traffic that it becomes a $100k bill is ridiculous and probably illegal.

Taxes are different because they never exceed the amount the person paying the taxes receives.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#284

Post by Ciantic »

Foobar8568 wrote: post #113
JackSlateur wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have billing limits https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cost-management/latest/userguide...

As far as I know, neither Google, Amazon or Azure have a budget limit, only alerts. This is a reason why I am not only clueless of anything related to cloud infrastructure unless it's stuff I am doing on the job, nor I am willing to build anything on these stacks. And while I guess I have less than 10 products build with these techs, I am appeal by the overall reliability of the services. Oh lastly, for Azure, in dif…

I've used Azure with spending limits. They do work, they shut down things, and the lights go off. [1], Only some external resources you are unlikely to use don't follow spending limits, but when you create such resources, they are clearly marked as external.

That's one positive side of Azure.

[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cost-management-

Re: Serverless Horrors

#285

Post by scarface_74 »

heyitsguay wrote: post #193
sbarre wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel that the likely answer here is that instrumenting real-time spending limit monitoring and cut-off at GCP/AWS scale is Complicated/Expensive to do, so they choose to not do it. I suppose you could bake the limits into each service at deploy time, but that's still a lot of code to write to provide a good experience to a customer who is trying to not pay you money. Not saying this is a good thing, but this feels…

Pass a law requiring cloud compute providers to accept a maximum user budget and be unable to charge more than that, and see how quickly the big cloud providers figure it out.

So tell me again who we need a law? Can you cite one instance where any of the cloud providers refused to give a refund to someone?

Re: Serverless Horrors

#286

Post by wild_egg »

layer8 wrote: post #269
coredog64 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We're talking about a $2.5T company. Literally every example in this thread is already negligible to Amazon already without circuit breakers.

Implementing that functionality across AWS would cost orders of magnitude more than just simply refunding random $100k charges.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#287

Post by bee_rider »

mgkimsal wrote: post #177
bee_rider wrote: post #122

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. 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 inheren…

So, are you looking for some “rate of charges” cap? Like, allow the charges to accumulate indefinitely, but keep track of how much $/sec is being accumulated, and don’t start up new services if it would cause the rate of charges to pass that threshold?

Might work. I do think that part of the appeal of these types of services is that you might briefly want to have a very high $/sec. But the idea makes sense, at least.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#288

Post by rustc »

JackSlateur wrote: post #142
JackSlateur wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have billing limits https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cost-management/latest/userguide...

To all of those who say "this is not limit, only notifications": yes, notifications that can trigger whatever you want, including a shutdown of whatever you have Is this a perfect solution: no Is this still a solution: yes

The notifications are not real time. You can rack up a significant bill before they are triggered.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#289

Post by mitjam »

I once found an official Microsoft example repo to deploy an LLM gateway on Azure with ALB. Glad I did the tedious work of estimating the costs before I hit the deploy button (had to go though many Biceps manifests for that). The setup would have cost me about 10k/month.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#290

Post by [deleted] »

wiether wrote: post #107
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…

> When I was learning to program through a bootcamp I spun up an elastic beanstalk instance Didn't the bootcamp told you to, at least, setup a budget alert? I'm not trying to reduce AWS' responsibility here, but if a teaching program tells you to use AWS but doesn't teach you how to use it correctly, you should question both AWS and the program's methods.

[deleted]
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