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AWS free tier data transfer expansion

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Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#111

Post by kam »

Someone1234 wrote: post #67

So which cloud provider offers a HARD spend limit? I just want to fund my account e.g. $20/month and never, ever, spend a cent over that. Even if my account gets hacked for bitcoin mining or whatever, I don't want to spend a cent over that. With AWS, you can do it, via a trigger on a spend notification and a script, but the whole thing is a giant kludge. It should be a default feature. It should be a default feature…

Backblaze B2 has separate hard spending limits for storage, bandwidth, and requests, which is an elegant solution to the "but what happens to your data if you hit the limit?" objections you often see in these threads.

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#113

Post by staticassertion »

bachmeier wrote: post #88
nanidin wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has been a while since I messed with the AWS panel, but IIRC you can set budget alerts so you’re notified once a threshold is crossed. It’s not a perfect solution, but if you expect to spend $0 then an alert on $0.01 is pretty trivial to set up and goes a long way to prevent end of the month surprises.

And if you get in a car accident and don't check your email for a few days? It's extremely hard to understand how a company with their resources is able to send a notification but not able to shut it off if that's what the customer wants.

Well they're two different problems. For AWS to give you an alert a service X needs to send billing data to the billing system.

For the billing system to then "turn off" X it needs a number of things.

1. It needs the ability to reach back out to that service. It probably has no idea what it is, all the billing system is likely to receive is something like:

    {service_name: "X", action: "Put"}
ie: Pretty opaque data with just enough structure to know "This costs X cents and happened Y times".

So now your billing system needs to be able to resolve "X" back to some AWS resource that it can talk to. Both the resolution of X as well as the "billing can now talk to every single AWS service" are pretty heavy lifts.

2. It needs to know what "off" is. "Off" for S3 could mean a lot of things.

a) Delete the bucket and all data inside of it

b) Keep the bucket but delete all data inside of it

c) Keep the bucket and the data but disable API access

etc etc. Do you disable PUT? GET? Both? What if what's blowing up your billing is GET?

And this really doesn't get easier for other systems. Do you back up a database before killing it? That incurs charges too.

I don't see AWS somehow solving this in a "one size fits all" way because there isn't one.

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#114

Post by throwaway2016a »

stillicidious wrote: post #51
mythz wrote: post #17

Was only a matter of time after their egregious egress fees were exposed, 2 Cloudflare posts that help make this happen: https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress/ https://www.cloudflare.com/press-releases/2021/cloudflare-an...

I've seen Cloudflare Enterprise accounts for two clients, the current one is paying the equivalent of $0.035/GB, the other was substantially higher although I've forgotten the numbers. Equivalent pricing from another vendor for the same service with enterprise support was $0.0021/GB. Their free bandwidth promises are grossly overstated, and possibly even a marketing fabrication, given previous reports here and elsewh…

We're talking about AWS though and AWS if you do fly.io looks interesting, though, never heard of them.

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#115

Post by slownews45 »

windexh8er wrote: post #103
stillicidious wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is whether what you're receiving is genuinely free, or a part of some squeezable marketing budget. In my experience it always makes sense to consider the latter. At some point that $595/mo. you're saving will appear on a lead sheet, whether it happens today or (similar to e.g. Google Apps) after 5 years. Also like Google, they're a public company nowadays and will eventually succumb like every company be…

> The question is whether what you're receiving is genuinely free, or a part of some squeezable marketing budget. Using any "free" service is generally not free as you scale. That's the freemium model we live in today. > Also like Google, they're a public company nowadays and will eventually succumb like every company before them to the realities of reporting growth. This is an unfortunate assumption with nothing to…

I really would love if folks talking about volatile AWS prices would actually give examples.

I have been screwed, personally, by enough "free" and "unlimited" offerings to never believe them.

On AWS, all the price changes I've had have been to reduce my costs. This is over a pretty long period.

So inform us of the uncertainty with AWS.

Google, sure, they could cancel or 3x your bill (hi Maps API customers etc). AWS does not have that history.

Cloudflare has secret pricing - that's the really annoying thing. Seriously, put a porn site up online with cloudflare and see how far "free" gets you.

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#116

Post by slownews45 »

tjoff wrote: post #44
Epskampie wrote: post #20

AWS free tier is horrible. You have to enter a creditcard to sign up, and then there is no way to prevent it being charged when you go over the limit for some reason. If you get on the frontpage of HN for example, you might be majorly screwed. It's a test account, I just want it to shut down when the limit is reached.

The solution is to not use AWS. Is is not a sacrifice to not engage with shady companies.

Um. They'd much rather deal with a waiver request from someone for $100 then to deal with a bad credit card in accounting spinning down a major account.

BTW - I've never heard of the later happening at AWS ever, and I have at other hosting providers.

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#117

Post by slownews45 »

swiftcoder wrote: post #101
orf wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok so how would this work in any other way? Should _every_ S3 action have a `if will_incur_charges() and should_not_incur_charges(): raise Exception()` statement in it's critical path? No, of course not. Everyone get's slower for nobodies benefit. It has to be delayed. But then you run into an issue: what if you end up costing AWS 100$ before the budget action kicks in. Should you not pay that? Why not?

> Should _every_ S3 action have a `if will_incur_charges() and should_not_incur_charges(): raise Exception()` statement in it's critical path? We're talking about one account-wide flag `has_exceeded_billing_limits`. Changes are infrequent, and can be pushed into caches. Small overruns while the flag pushes are trivially eaten by AWS.

You claim that a bunch of GPU crypto minors won't exploit a chance to incur billing overruns if amazon waives charges?

The amazon deal is simple. Very clear pricing for pay what you use.

Cloudflare - can you link to the page where they show the cost of bandwidth? Still waiting.

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#118

Post by philsnow »

Someone1234 wrote: post #67

So which cloud provider offers a HARD spend limit? I just want to fund my account e.g. $20/month and never, ever, spend a cent over that. Even if my account gets hacked for bitcoin mining or whatever, I don't want to spend a cent over that. With AWS, you can do it, via a trigger on a spend notification and a script, but the whole thing is a giant kludge. It should be a default feature. It should be a default feature…

Maybe not the kind of "cloud provider" you're thinking about but tarsnap works on a prepaid basis. You top up your account and it debits that account daily. You get warnings when you go in the red. Super simple.

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#119

Post by the8472 »

staticassertion wrote: post #109
Someone1234 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really disingenuous. The complaint here is that Amazon offers a free tier supposedly for learning the platform, but it is a giant footgun that shoots a ton of people in the foot. People are reasonably asking for hard limits to protect them from this highly foreseeable situation wherein a complicated cloud offering can go on a spending runaway. It is literally as easy as following a beginner tutorial and select…

"Kill my service if I hit a billing limit" is a scary footgun as well, and one that could impact larger customers. I don't think it's unreasonable to say that if you're using AWS you're taking on some responsibility to make sure you're not blowing up your bill. AFAIK you are automatically enrolled in emails that will tell you when you're about to exit a free tier limit, so it's not like they won't warn you.

> "Kill my service if I hit a billing limit" is a scary footgun as well, and one that could impact larger customers.

Then make it opt-in but a highly visible one during account creation so that people who just want to test can enable it.

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#120

Post by jffry »

staticassertion wrote: post #109
Someone1234 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really disingenuous. The complaint here is that Amazon offers a free tier supposedly for learning the platform, but it is a giant footgun that shoots a ton of people in the foot. People are reasonably asking for hard limits to protect them from this highly foreseeable situation wherein a complicated cloud offering can go on a spending runaway. It is literally as easy as following a beginner tutorial and select…

"Kill my service if I hit a billing limit" is a scary footgun as well, and one that could impact larger customers. I don't think it's unreasonable to say that if you're using AWS you're taking on some responsibility to make sure you're not blowing up your bill. AFAIK you are automatically enrolled in emails that will tell you when you're about to exit a free tier limit, so it's not like they won't warn you.

Nobody is suggesting to make that the default uniformly across all AWS accounts.

It would be excellent for anybody intending to use the free tier for its stated purpose (getting to know the AWS platform) who would like to make the _choice_ to shut off their services if they are going to exceed the free tier quotas.

That way you are free to experiment, and if you blow up something while learning, you're not then leaning on the mercy of AWS support to refund you.

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