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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

#121

Post by qaq »

Terretta wrote: post #58
benjaminwootton wrote: post #37

AWS 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.

Whats your monthly spend? I used to work for an org with 50K monthly spend none cared at AWS about us. Now I work for a big org with very serious spend and it's night and day we can get access to eng. quickly we have regular meetings with PMs and get our requests for AWS features put onto roadmap etc.

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

#122

Post by closeparen »

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…

One big problem with that is the dichotomy between "cloud" and "open source" - people will pay for SaaS but they absolutely balk at paying for licenses.

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

#123

Post by xeromal »

axpy906 wrote: post #118

Why are the top comments companies promoting their solution? Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s find to do so I just don’t expect them at the top.

I don't see any top 1st level comments promoting anything. The only promotions I see are comments to the top comments which is hard to avoid!

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

#125

Post by jrockway »

ak217 wrote: post #119
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.…

The pricing on reserved instances is so appealing over on-demand instances, though, that people are using it for more than just opex vs. capex accounting. You legitimately save money by buying in advance.

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

#126

Post by dom96 »

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 is the reason I have always stayed away from AWS and stuck to Digital Ocean/Linode. I'm sure I'm not the only one. But I am always surprised to see people complaining about this and still using AWS.

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

#127

Post by res0nat0r »

ramshanker wrote: post #9
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.

If not possible to cap price, starting with the capacity limiter on S3 and bandwidth limit at VPC level would do. The possibility that someone flood the server even for static resources causing bandwidth spiked Bill is scary.

Set an SNS alert to sent an email/SMS message to your phone if your monthly bill goes over whatever $X you decide. I've had this set on my personal account for years and it isn't too hard to configure, most of it is just point and click via the SNS and CloudWatch GUIs and is pretty foolproof.

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

#128

Post by Saris »

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.

Yeah it has firmly kept me away from AWS, Google cloud, and similar.

I use Vultr or Digitalocean if I need a server somewhere because at least it's just a pre-set cost.

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

#129

Post by smoldesu »

axpy906 wrote: post #118

Why are the top comments companies promoting their solution? Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s find to do so I just don’t expect them at the top.

This has been increasingly prevalent on HN, and I'd (eventually) like to see something done about it. Sure, Hacker News is a project incubator at heart, so it will naturally have a higher ratio of CEOs:normal_users. That doesn't excuse how obnoxious it is seeing someone plug their SAAS-of-the-day on seemingly innocuous information (like how Fig hitched a ride on a Brew PSA).

It's frustrating me to the point where I might just leave this site. I'm sick and tired of this new-wave guerilla marketing.

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

#130

Post by conradludgate »

withinboredom wrote: post #107
koolba wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Because you should have 2fa set up and your access to AWS accounts should expire after 1 hour. Also, you likely have full disk encryption enabled, and the person stealing your laptop is unlikely to know who you work for and are more interested in selling it.

If someone acquires credentials, they are usually multi use and long term. And it can go unnoticed if an ec2 instance is span up running crypto mining on your dime, only for you to notice at the end of the day that your estimated bill has shot through the roof

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