Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Serverless Horrors

serverlesshorrors.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 503 posts

Re: Serverless Horrors

#351

Post by aarmot »

scarface_74 wrote: post #331
pclmulqdq wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are economic realists about this. They say "yes" if they can't realistically get $100k from you for your error.

I have never in 9 years working with AWS - four at product companies as the architect, 3.5 at AWS itself working in the Professional Services department and the last two working at 3rd party companies - ever heard or read about anyone either on a personal project or a large organization not be able to get a refund or in the case of a large org, sometimes a credit from AWS when they made a mistake that was costly to t…

From your bragging one could tell that you have seen _a lot_ of charging mistakes and "happy" refund stories from AWS. It's scary that a single human can do extensive statistics on personal experience about these monetary horror stories, don't you think?

Re: Serverless Horrors

#352

Post by ipaddr »

derefr wrote: post #310
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.

You're misunderstanding the offering. (Maybe that's their fault for using intentionally misleading language... but using that language in this way is pretty common nowadays, so this is important to understand.) For a postpaid service with usage-based billing, there are no separate "free" and "paid" plans (= what you're clearly thinking of when you're saying "tiers" here.) The "free tier" of these services, is a set o…

Oracle can do it.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#353

Post by hvb2 »

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.

The cost of going through that list often outweighs the cost of the hardware, by a lot.

And in a lot of cases it's hard to find out if a production application can be switched off. Since the cost is typically small for an unused application, I don't know if there are many people willing to risk being wrong

Re: Serverless Horrors

#354

Post by pythonaut_16 »

bee_rider wrote: post #292
fredophile wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Cloud providers charge for holding data, for ingress/egress, and for compute (among other things). If I hit my budget by using too much compute, then keeping my data will cause the budget to be exceeded. The difference is that cloud providers charge you for the “at rest” configuration, doing nothing isn’t free.

Great so they can give you an option to kill all charges except basic storage. Or let you reserve part of your budget for storage. Or let you choose to have everything hard deleted.

Surely these billion and trillion dollar companies can figure out something so basic.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#355

Post by pclmulqdq »

scarface_74 wrote: post #331
pclmulqdq wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are economic realists about this. They say "yes" if they can't realistically get $100k from you for your error.

I have never in 9 years working with AWS - four at product companies as the architect, 3.5 at AWS itself working in the Professional Services department and the last two working at 3rd party companies - ever heard or read about anyone either on a personal project or a large organization not be able to get a refund or in the case of a large org, sometimes a credit from AWS when they made a mistake that was costly to t…

I assume you have seen many casual instances of cost overrun in that time. I'm sure you've also seen instances where an extra $10k flies out the door to AWS and people think "no big deal, that one was on us." This world doesn't have to exist. Even if AWS has a policy of always refunding people for a big oopsie, the fact that you have seen so many big ones suggests that you have also seen a lot of little ones.

By the way, there is nothing stopping AWS from reversing their trend of issuing refunds for big mistakes. "It hasn't happened in the past" isn't a great way to argue "it won't happen in the future."

Re: Serverless Horrors

#356

Post by croes »

kleinsch wrote: post #59
croes wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s why I prefer prepaid cards or those I can easily freeze to prevent any booking.

Freezing a card doesn’t mean the debt is erased. They can still take you to collections.

But it’s a difference to object their claims while you still have your money instead of being in debt while you try to get your money back

Re: Serverless Horrors

#357

Post by ipaddr »

scarface_74 wrote: post #331
pclmulqdq wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are economic realists about this. They say "yes" if they can't realistically get $100k from you for your error.

I have never in 9 years working with AWS - four at product companies as the architect, 3.5 at AWS itself working in the Professional Services department and the last two working at 3rd party companies - ever heard or read about anyone either on a personal project or a large organization not be able to get a refund or in the case of a large org, sometimes a credit from AWS when they made a mistake that was costly to t…

https://medium.com/%40akshay.kannan.email/amazon-is-refusing...

https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/rm8t2j/any_experience_...

Re: Serverless Horrors

#358

Post by notrealyme123 »

scarface_74 wrote: post #278
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”.

Must be really nice people there which don't want any money. Really warms my heart.

ofc. When things go viral they say "yes". But i would really love to get some number how many students and hobbiests got a 1k-2k bill and just paid it for the problem to go away.

Amazon is a publicly traded company. If they wave fees every time something goes wrong, investors would tell them something.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#359

Post by [deleted] »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #348
rustc wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then don’t use a service that has a reputation for poor customer service? Like they use to say about IBM… “No one ever got fired for choosing AWS (or Azure)”

[deleted]

Re: Serverless Horrors

#360

Post by belter »

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…

Did you do any training before launching the elastic beanstalk instance, or you just though a F-16 should be pretty easy to fly, at least according to most pilots?
Post reply on HN