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AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion

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Re: AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion

#521

One can almost smell the vibes. This is peanuts compared to a major cybersecurity catastrophe that’s surely in the making. To give credit to the technology and the people using it - and I’m not being facetious - it’s actually incredible that at the current levels of usage the unprecedented catastrophic event has not yet happened.

It was the mid 2010s when I sensed a lot of SaaS becoming popular. Just host your ticketing systems, your IT management planes, your security management consoles, your SOC, all off-premises. I wonder if businesses are thinking of ever swinging back to locally hosted, with the increased hostility of the Internet re: AI, vulnerabilities, DoS, and so on.

One thing that you need to understand is that the usual business manager absolutely hates depending on technical expertise, and that the modern corporate world is fanatically anti-intellectual.

Vendor lock-in? compliance and security risks? stupid systems that cost the company an arm and a leg? nobody fucking cares.

Now, depending on an 130 IQ Engineer that basically holds the whole enterprise on his head? Anathema!!!!!!! Bus Factor!!!!

Re: AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion

#522
post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you speaking from experience or simply making things up? I know a fair number of former AWS engineers and managers. None of them think like this.

Maybe they are former AWS employees for a reason and now want things to go better than they were at AWS.

[dead]

Re: AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion

#523
post #506
post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you speaking from experience or simply making things up? I know a fair number of former AWS engineers and managers. None of them think like this.

"Former" seems to an important detail here.

If someone quits their job, do all their opinions suddenly become suspect? You're kind of damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't. Either you work for the company and you are biased one way, or you quit and now your bias is now suddenly the other way. I've joined and quit many jobs and my opinion may or may not have changed due to my change in status but it is clearly and ad hominem attack.

Re: AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion

#524
post #92

Ask for some leniency. Let your account rep know about your budget difficulties and ask if you can make good faith payments of a few billion per month until you get back on your feet.

Ummm no. Do not show a sign of weakness like this. Address the problem head on and get a credit card with a bigger limit.

Re: AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion

#525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I must've put a decimal point in the wrong place or something. I always mess up some mundane detail."

Unit mistakes happen all the time, which is why you should be using your units library religiously and still being vigilant even then. Worst case I've found was off by 15 orders of magnitude.

One of the Mars landers famously failed due to unit conversion errors from metric to standard.

Re: AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion

#527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 194,400.00 USD annually Fuck it, im in.

Just wait until the same system runs payroll and you're getting paid $1.94400 annually.

I will just tell the HR bot that I am meant to be paid 1.944 billion.

Re: AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion

#528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> After 14 months I got a $7,000 refund. I was told it had to be approved by the head of AWS. $7,000 of credits is no problem. At that time a friendly neighborhood PM or director could issue the credit without much oversight. Your problem is the time period. Amending a bill in the same cycle is EZ. Fixing the previous cycle is a PITA but pretty common. Issuing amendments for the previous financial _years_ would be a…

Reminds me of working for a cable company and being told that even if we screwed up and stole from the customer the look back period was only a few months and if we found an error from before that we weren't supposed to correct it.

There's a certain obligation on both sides of a contract to pay attention.

If you're not watching your billing, and then try to claim overcharging a year later, you'll get a lot less satisfaction even from regulators or judges than if you notice it when (or soon after) it happens.

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