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AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance

aws.amazon.com

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Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance

#111

Post by withinboredom »

Silhouette wrote: post #56
Nextgrid wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The possibility that someone flood the server even for static resources causing bandwidth spiked Bill is scary. Genuinely curious, is this just a side-effect of the cloud craze or did DDoS attacks become so powerful that old-school approaches of appropriately-sized bare-metal infrastructure with finite but unmetered bandwidth are no longer viable? The way I see it, you can provision enough unmetered bandwidth to co…

You could still run many systems just fine on private infrastructure with at most a business-class Internet connection to your office or a colo bill for putting your servers somewhere more central. This didn't magically stop working just because someone got paid a lot of money to do PR for cloud services. By the time you take into account the financial costs and inherent risks of cloud hosting, maybe more things shou…

We still use bare-metal at Automattic. All our global-scale admin stuff is open source... it shouldn't be surprising that bash scripts aren't all that interesting. People want it written in Go, with Raft-consensus to think for us humans, running on blockchain.

Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance

#112

Post by roystonvassey »

academia_hack wrote: post #4

I really wish you could just designate a group of resources as unimportant, set a billing limit, and let Amazon nuke everything / delete your files / whatever, if you go over the limit. Everytime I try to learn cloud infrastructure stuff I'm terrified of the literally infinite bill that might show up from a typo a month down the line.

That fear of a huge bill is real and much more common than you think.

Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance

#113

Post by dimitrios1 »

roystonvassey wrote: post #112
academia_hack wrote: post #4

I really wish you could just designate a group of resources as unimportant, set a billing limit, and let Amazon nuke everything / delete your files / whatever, if you go over the limit. Everytime I try to learn cloud infrastructure stuff I'm terrified of the literally infinite bill that might show up from a typo a month down the line.

That fear of a huge bill is real and much more common than you think.

It's a rational fear as well. It happens more often than one would think.

Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance

#114

Post by techrat »

simonw wrote: post #15

Does 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.

You'd probably be better off signing up for an Oracle Always-Free tier as there's no billing information stored should anything run into costs. But as the name implies, it's always free, so your performance, bandwidth and space allocation is substantially lower than the paid options.

Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance

#115

Post by Aerroon »

modeless wrote: post #66
ZeroCool2u wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think GCP's official method for doing this is pretty similar to what you describe. You basically create a cloud function that disables billing if your bill goes over a configured limit. It's not perfect, because there's a tiny bit of lag between usage and billing calculation, but you'll only end up with a few dollars over the limit instead of thousands. Truly the nuclear option though.

I did this last year for my project, except instead of disabling billing which would nuke everything, I wrote a service that runs every day, looks up my remaining monthly budget and sets the daily quotas on the APIs I use so they can't use more than my budget. (Which wouldn't be necessary if they offered monthly quotas to match the monthly billing period, but they don't.) Then last month I got an email saying "Hey, t…

And this is something that should've been added years ago. How many people have decided not to use these services because trying things out to learn seemed too risky? They're not going to gain these skills either, so they argue for alternatives when they actually need these capabilities.

Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance

#116

Post by mediamachiner »

academia_hack wrote: post #4

I really wish you could just designate a group of resources as unimportant, set a billing limit, and let Amazon nuke everything / delete your files / whatever, if you go over the limit. Everytime I try to learn cloud infrastructure stuff I'm terrified of the literally infinite bill that might show up from a typo a month down the line.

This terrifying scenario is kinda common. We've come across a bunch of tweets like: https://twitter.com/alexwlchan/status/1399095011178958851

This inspired us to add billing limits to our SaaS product so that users don't have be in scary situations with bill run offs: https://mediamachine.io/blog/protect-your-customers-with-bil...

Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance

#117

Post by onion2k »

ctvo wrote: post #14
academia_hack wrote: post #4

I really wish you could just designate a group of resources as unimportant, set a billing limit, and let Amazon nuke everything / delete your files / whatever, if you go over the limit. Everytime I try to learn cloud infrastructure stuff I'm terrified of the literally infinite bill that might show up from a typo a month down the line.

Just use the free tier? You’re notified when you’re approaching the free limit. AWS, anecdotally, has removed 5k++ mistakes I’ve made with little question. (One example they forgave due to my carelessness: ECS and Fargate service with logging to CloudWatch but with verbose logging on. The bill was 8k that month for just CloudWatch usage)

It's great that they forgave you. I know a startup that incurred a $30k bill that they didn't forgive. The startup folded.

AWS's unknowable policy for the cost of errors represents a huge risk for individuals and small businesses. It puts a lot of people off.

Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance

#119

Post by ak217 »

luxpsycho wrote: post #6

What's the point, if there isn't a discount for paying upfront? Will some people/businesses prefer this because it's not 'credit'—does AWS scrobble to your Credit Report in any country? I am failing to see the appeal here...

Other comments have covered cases like departments having money left over in their quarterly budgets, or companies looking to spend in a particular quarter for earnings/tax deduction reasons, or reducing currency risk by hedging forex prices. But the biggest use by far that I've seen for this is government/public orgs that are prevented by outdated laws/auditing regulations/processes from using pay-as-you-go models. They are forced by their accounting department/government grant to treat infra expenses as capex and have zero budget to expense them as opex (this model assumes an on-prem physical plant for an IT department). Previously AWS had a way to get around part of that with reserved instances, this solution is more comprehensive.
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