Sorry but I did not understand the ‘cool’ part. With Linode & Webfaction I was able to prepay via credit card too. What is the advantage? To get block me if the credit is too low for s specific service?
AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance
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Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance
#102No mention of discounts, so this is probably a purely cashflow / tax management system.
Discount?
Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
For companies operating on a cash basis with a standard Jan-Dec fiscal calendar (e.g. most small businesses), this would allow you to deduct future spending by prepurchasing AWS credits. It locks away whatever money you dedicate to it but that’d be peanuts compared to paying income tax on it in order to carry it forward as retained earnings.
I don't think that works the way you suggest, but I also admit the guidance is unclear. Reg. Section 1.461-1(a)(1) provides the following: If an expenditure results in the creation of an asset having a useful life which extends substantially beyond the close of the taxable year, such an expenditure may not be deductible, or may be deductible only in part, for the taxable year in which made. https://www.law.cornell.ed…
This isn’t purchase of a capitalizable asset, it’s renting as an operational expense ;)
Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance
#104Does this mean I can set up a static website on S3, pre-pay fir the next hundred years of hosting costs and then pretty much forget about it? Because I would genuinely love to be able to do that.
No. S3, like most AWS services, has uncapped costs. If you experience higher than expected load, such as a DDoS attempt, you'll burn through the preallocated spend and you'll still get a bill afterward.
This doesn't appear to actually shut down the resources once the preallocated spend is exhausted. Its just a way to pay for bills preemptively instead of when you receive them. Its an accounting thing, not a new feature.
Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
You will still owe the incurred charges and AWS can send it to collections.
I do this. I’d much rather have AWS needing to call me to negotiate / collect than having $15k go through my CC as a legit authorized charge.
Unless they call you, refuse to negotiate and still send it to collections as it is (at least in their mind) a legitimate charge.
All these stories of providers giving "good will" credit for these massive charges really concerns me when you look at how other parts of these companies ignore their customers or only reply with scripted responses.
Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance
#106Sorry but I did not understand the ‘cool’ part. With Linode & Webfaction I was able to prepay via credit card too. What is the advantage? To get block me if the credit is too low for s specific service?
Believe it or not a big part of cloud migration is figuring out how to cost it and get the finance people on board with after-the-fact operational expenses (*aaS) replacing capital/labor expenses (servers, sysadmins, network engineers, etc). When I worked in defense contracting I sat through half a dozen meetings with cloud vendors and virtually all of them took the time to explain how the costing model was distinct from on-prem, how to estimate and budget, governance, etc. At the end of the day many orgs with deep pockets also have very entrenched financial processes. AWS is doing everything that it can to make a play for these dollars by creating on-ramps such as this one.
Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm terrified of the literally infinite bill that might show up from a typo a month down the line Whilst this might sound funny, we were surprised to see it as a common use-cases with users putting https://github.com/infracost/infracost in their CI/CD pipelines to act as safety net. Currently it only works for Terraform users, but we plan to add other infra-as-code tools in the future. We're also discussing how we…
> Perhaps having separate AWS accounts ... You absolutely must, MUST, MUST be using separate AWS accounts for separate purposes. You can have as many as you’d like and roll up the billing into one actual paying account. This is a win for accountability (roll up dev and easily see the split out for separate environments), but more importantly for security as it limits the blast radius for any one environment. Combined…
This seems silly to me. I (personally) think it is much more likely for your computer to be stolen/hacked/ransomed than a single account credential to be leaked. If so, "the blast radius" will be whatever you're logged into ... and if you're logged into everything, what's the point?
Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Single most obvious customer obsessed (their tenet BTW) feature they could add, but after over a decade of requests, it's seemingly clear they won't. It keeps me from playing with AWS for side projects as well. Their loss.
This is something that everyone seems to ask for (I know I'd love it), but they haven't implemented it. To me that suggests that they _can't_. My guess is that billing lags enough that they can't stick to a price cap, which means that they either have to guarantee the price cap and swallow the difference, which could be exploited by malicious users to get free compute, or they have to say that there's a delay on it w…
> This is something that everyone seems to ask for (I know I'd love it), but they haven't implemented it. To me that suggests that they _can't_.
Or maybe it is a costly implementation that would not bring any profits.
The strange thing is that the lack of this feature seems too incur a cost as it causes more calls to customer support. So, maybe it's that implement this feature will reduce profit more that it will reduce cost.
Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance
#109ELI5 does this mean I can prepay and not be at risk for more than I have prepaid?
No. It just means that you can give money to AWS without having a bill, you are still responsible for the charges incurred regardless of how much you paid in advance.
Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance
#110AWS billing practices are horrible, and they are increasingly more “Oracle” like in their approach. I had a security issue related to a SaaS product which led to a $7k AWS line item when someone started sending a LIST request to S3 buckets billions of times. They would not consider refunding. Now I’m having a bunch of problems terminating some AWS Orgs accounts and they are being deliberately difficult in getting it…
Anecdata, but my experience as CTO of a startup, a hedge fund, and a bank has been the opposite. I’ve never had an unexpected cost they didn’t readily credit back, provided we were taking the recommended and reasonably easy steps to keep on top of costs and limits.
The problem is relying on this "good will" and "one time only" to credit back compared with having a way to set hard billing limits so you don't need to have this conversation as a part of your business as usual. Mistakes will always happen with something as complex as this and that's what billing and rate limits are supposed to protect your against.