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Serverless Horrors

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Re: Serverless Horrors

#401

Post by pclmulqdq »

ipaddr wrote: post #357
scarface_74 wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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_...

Both of these are about an account compromise, which is a really fascinating story about incentives. An accidental overrun on something you designed on AWS indicates you are hooked on their drugs, so obviously the dealer is happy to give you another free hit after you had a bad trip. That's good marketing. An account compromise has no intention, so giving you a refund is just a waste.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#402

Post by sokoloff »

Touche wrote: post #387
sokoloff wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suppose you’re going over the billing cap based on your storage consumption, how would AWS stop the continued consumption without deleting storage?

Why would they need to delete storage, they could just not accept past the cap.

Storage billing is partly time-based.

EBS is billed by the second (with a one minute minimum, I think).

Once a customer hits their billing cap, either AWS has to give away that storage, have the bill continue to increase, or destroy user data.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#403

Post by scarface_74 »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #355
scarface_74 wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes and I’ve also seen bad on prem build outs, bad hires, bad initiatives, proof of concepts that didn’t go anywhere, etc

Re: Serverless Horrors

#404

Post by chmod775 »

These guys charge $550 for a measly terabyte of bandwidth?

If you get a dedi on a 10Gb/s guaranteed port and it works out to more than $3 / TB, you're probably getting scammed. How does "serverless" justify 150x that? Are people hosting some silly projects really dense enough to fall for that kind of pricing?

Just get a $10 VPS somewhere or throw stuff on GH pages. Your video game wiki/technical documentation/blog will be fine on there and - with some competent setup - still be ready for 10k concurrent users you'll never have.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#405

Post by wahnfrieden »

nostrebored wrote: post #305
cm2187 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about spending caps / circuit breakers? Doesn't seem an unsolveable problem to me.

Then you’re the person who took down their small business when they were doing well. At AWS I’d consistently have customers who’d architected horrendously who wanted us to cover their 7/8 figure “losses” when something worked entirely as advertised. Small businesses often don’t know what they want, other than not being responsible for their mistakes.

Every business has a bill they are unprepared to pay without evaluating and approving budget, even under successful conditions and even if that approval step is a 10 second process. It's obvious that Amazon does not add this because of substantial profit over any other concern.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#406

Post by wahnfrieden »

wild_egg wrote: post #286
layer8 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They also refuse refunds. Because it is profitable, even if the customer is unhappy to pay it.

If it were highly profitable for them to implement some form of budget cap cutoffs, they would! It's obvious it's not a game they are interested in.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#407

Post by wahnfrieden »

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.

There are several satisfactory solutions available. Every other solution they offer was made with tradeoffs and ambiguous requirements they had to make a call on. It is obviously misaligned incentive rather than an impossibility. If they could make more money from it, they would be offering something. Product offering gaps are not merely technical impossibilities.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#408

Post by theamk »

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.

While I can imagine having budget overload from storage, most (all?) of the "horrors" on the page are from compute or access.

Set it up so that machines are deleted, but EBS volumes remain. S3 bucket is locked-out but data is safe.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#409

Post by bee_rider »

exe34 wrote: post #379
bee_rider wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you resolve the situation where ongoing storage costs cause the limit (whatever it is) to be exceeded?

I wouldn't. I've explained what I want.

There isn’t an option to not resolve “you’ve reached your billing limit and now storage charges are exceeding it.” You can resolve it by unceremoniously dumping the user data. You can resolve it by… continuing to charge the user, and holding their files hostage until they pay the back storage charges, and then the egress fees (so, it isn’t really a limit at all). Or you can resolve it by just giving the user free storage by some other name.

Just saying that there should be a limit is not an explanation.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#410

Post by pclmulqdq »

scarface_74 wrote: post #403
pclmulqdq wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes and I’ve also seen bad on prem build outs, bad hires, bad initiatives, proof of concepts that didn’t go anywhere, etc

Sure. The issues with AWS could all be solved with decent billing software, though. 15 years in there isn't a good excuse for this state of the world except that it's profitable.
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