Lucky. I’m on the hook for 54 billion (and change).
AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion
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Re: AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion
#412it seems like these types of problems have gained frequency in the ai era, or is it just recency bias?
Re: AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion
#413Earlier quoted context omitted.
Realtime billing seems entirely within the abilities of AWS. "Limits except for Storage" seems even easier - I don't think I've ever heard of a storage-based billing story, although I'm sure one or two exist
Storage-based billing is huge, unless you mean something other than “places that make you pay for storage separately”. Also many places I’ve worked, storage is a huge part of the spend but that depends a lot on what you do. e-commerce doesn’t use a ton of it, but if you handle user-generated content or do any kind of training (LLM, computer vision, etc) then you can very much end up in a place where storage becomes a…
Storage-based billing stories. When an account is hijacked it's always for compute, not storage.
Re: AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion
#414Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is this, US health care negotiations?
https://health.amazon.com/prime
https://health.amazon.com/prime
Ugh. No. Never. Do not use Amazon Pharmacy.
I had it for three months, and each month it was unable to deliver pills before I ran out, so I cancelled and switched to the brick-and-mortar pharmacy down the street.
A year later, suddenly Amazon Pharmacy starts sending unauthorized prescription refill requests to my doctor.
I still have the account cancellation confirmation e-mail from Amazon Pharmacy, but Amazon won't close my account. Amazon's account rep says it cannot close accounts for "legal reasons." Bullshit. He can't say what the legal reasons are, or point me to a document stating these conditions.
Now my doctor's office just ignores all refill requests from Amazon Pharmacy.
Never trust your health to big tech.
Re: AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion
#415A guy on the sysadmin subreddit managed to 8x the global GDP https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1uz2fv2/aws_says_...
I liked this comment from that thread :)
> I think you should spin up a whole bunch more instances, and try to cause an integer overflow so they they owe you $978 Trillion.
Re: AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion
#416It's crazy enough this will be fixed soon. Years ago I found an actual hidden error in my bill. (This was early 2010s). The system was calculating the EC2 reservation savings incorrectly for some of my servers. I was crunching all their detailed usage data on a regular basis in an 18 tab spreadsheet and couldn't get it to fully reconcile. I spent months trying to track down the discrepancy. Once I found it, I had to…
A couple of my coworkers think I’m nuts for watching cost explorer so closely but 1. The time it takes to look and notice costs that don’t make sense easily pays for itself, and then some (in my experience). I doubt you spent $7k of your time tracking this down, and you probably noticed optimization opportunities that saved you even more 2. I hate the idea of wasting money on buying Jeff Bezos a bigger yacht
I've personally noticed and saved multiple $xx,xxx monthly cost billing spikes just by take a daily glance at our cost explorer. I'm in the AWS accounts every day doing investigative work anyway that an extra 30-60 seconds is trivial.
Seeing something "small" like an ECS task that is continuously failing to start properly because of a bug and repeatedly pulls a container image or a lambda function that's taking longer that it reasonably should (takes 5-10 seconds when it's normally a tens or a few hundred milliseconds) can dramatically drive up a bill in short order.
Re: AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion
#417Probably the closest I've ever been to getting a heart attack. Normally <$1 per month, and now suddenly $284,006,266,443.74. Whatever the bug is on their end, this is unforgivable.
Yeah, this one is bad because it’s off by so much I’m shocked it wasn’t caught by tests, alerts about unusual changes in the billing system, or even accounting. Like surely the P&L reports look all kinds of wrong right now, they have to be showing like 6M% profit margins and revenue measured in quadrillions. I’m also a little surprised this didn’t trip a circuit breaker. For something as non-real-time as billing, I’m…
I don’t know how something like this makes it to prod. That’s multiple levels of failure.
Re: AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion
#418Stop bragging, The Onion already reported on a one man company who is $1B in debt.
"CEO Reveals How He Used AI To Build One-Person Company That's $1.3 Billion In Debt"
Re: AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion
#419Earlier quoted context omitted.
Someone said the numbers are all off by 2^30 because they screwed up and are charging the per GB price for each byte. It’s probably an artifact of them all being currency multiples of 2^30
Well, for my case, I was paying $0 (Exactly, I managed to hunt down and delete every last resource in my account a few months ago). It was displaying $430 million for me. I don't think that is 0*2^30.
Huh, that is odd. Working backwards, that would be ~ $0.40 originally. Wonder if that’s also flat out wrong or if they’re doing some kind of currency handling that breaks when you start dealing with huge multipliers.
Re: AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion
#420Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, that's the really fun part. The unprecedented catastrophic event is already happening. Several of them, in fact. By the time we notice, it'll be too late.
its like slowly boiling the frog
Or slowly boiling a human. The frog is actually smart enough to not fall for that.