Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance

aws.amazon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 184 posts

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

#131

Post by bostonsre »

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.

I think confusion around billing has to be intentional at this point. I would guess they are making >$1b every year due to users not understanding the consequences of their actions fully.

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

#132

Post by Silhouette »

closeparen wrote: post #122
Silhouette wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In this hypothetical scenario the real money might be in consultancy. "Sure, we can get your organisation set up with OpenNotAWSBecauseTrademarks. Our rates are $20K/consultant/week and we expect to bring a team of 5 for a fortnight." It just has to be a comparable cost and financial structure to how a large organisation trying to escape from cloud lock-in would have otherwise expected to engage their cloud architecture consultants or cloud security red team or other cloud specialists and then you're in the game.

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

#133

Post by freedomben »

zodiakzz wrote: post #52

I wish Digital Ocean would allow this. My country's debit/credit cards don't work online reliably, my attached cards can start getting rejected randomly any time. I'm always nervous about getting my account suspended due to missed payments, DO is pretty forgiving thankfully.

Interesting, I had the opposite experience. The cardholder forgot what Digital Ocean was and placed a chargeback. Do immediately locked my account which had been in good standing for years. I couldn't log in the console or API to do anything. I wrote about it here if you're interested to learn more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25806086

Linode is very similar pricing/offering and has incredible customer service. I'm very happy with them.

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

#134

Post by rodgerd »

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…

> and they are increasingly more “Oracle” like in their approach.

Ironically the Oracle cloud seems more price-reasonable (for now).

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

#135

Post by WaxProlix »

Sevii wrote: post #74
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…

It may be a 'must' for security but from a UX perspective it is a horrible experience. Does it make sense for one team to have 10+ AWS accounts per service because 'security'? How about if each team out of 1000s in your company has 10 AWS accounts per service? We run our service in 3 geographic regions and have a separate AWS account for each region and stage despite each account supporting resources in multiple regi…

I happily use 40+ accounts per service, and don't think it's an undue burden. Accounts are free and represent a convenient natural boundary for data, access, and oopsie-daisy mitigation.

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

#137

Post by kelp »

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.

Unfortunately it's also not just resources that cost money.

A couple of fun billing surprises I've seen.

1. A bug in a system that uploaded quite a lot of data to Amazon S3 caused it to hit the S3 API to the tune of about $10K/day. Because AWS billing is usually 2-3 days lagged, it took us 3 days to notice. We fixed it right away once we found it. Goodby to that $30K.

2. An engineer did an Athena query that happened to walk many TB of data. And they unknowingly did it in us-west-2, but the data was in us-east-1. So that resulted in a cross region transfer to the tune of $10K for that single query.

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

#138

Post by 3pt14159 »

Even though I'm no where close to the world's best AWS developer, I happened onto a contract for a major stock exchange and ended up writing code that truly commands fleets of computers. What I learned: There are plenty of ways to optimize your AWS spend. Hire consultants, especially ones that do so on commission. There are so many tricks that work 99% of the time and will save you a ton. For example, read-before-update on DynamoDB. Puts are expensive, reads are cheap. Depending on your data you may be able to do the diff in code and only push the delta. There are many other optimizations. If you're a growing business it helps to get help with this stuff. I never would have guessed were it not for the pros that worked for my client.

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

#139

Post by ValentineC »

Saris wrote: post #128
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.

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

To be fair, AWS Lightsail should be an option too. Lightsail machines come with a fairly competitive amount of bandwidth.

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

#140

Post by ValentineC »

withinboredom wrote: post #111
Silhouette wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are they published somewhere on https://github.com/Automattic?
Post reply on HN