131–140 of 175 posts
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Let's not poo poo actual competition. If Oracle _wants_ to compete with AWS that's a pretty good thing for everyone.
Plus they hired away a ton of AWS engineers to build their competitor right down the street from AWS headquarters. I wouldn't dismiss it out of hand.
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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 wit…
Admittedly, all of these are real issues. The thing is that for a company with 1.816 trillion (1816 billion!) market cap as of today, all of these issues are easily solvable. But it's not a matter of "we can't solve it" or even "we don't have the resources to do it, there is some higher priority problem to tackle first". It's not an engineering problem at all at its heart. It's a marketing/business problem that someo…
My point is that it is definitely an engineering problem as well as a product problem.
a) It's going to be super technically difficult to build (especially in a way where it's responsive at a granular basis to handle huge blow-up bursts)
b) It's not even clear what you're supposed to be building
None of what people are proposing is well defined or easy to build.
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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 d…
> I really would love if folks talking about volatile AWS prices would actually give examples. There was never any mention of "volatile" pricing. Egregious? Yes. Volatile? No. There's a significant difference of meaning with those words. Here's a perfect example [0] by Corey Quinn. > So inform us of the uncertainty with AWS. I didn't mention "uncertainty with AWS". I mentioned that there is no more certainty with AWS…
Can you say the same about cloudflare? No. Can you say the same about oracle? No - they have a miserable history of screwing customers.
AWS is offering clear pricing, cloudflare is not. It's really that simple.
This makes me realize that folks just don't understand the value AWS is providing, and is perhaps why they can charge such insane prices.
People with actual money to spend don't want "free" because they don't believe it's actually free.
In terms of cloudflare, they have something like a negative 60% operating margin. The idea of building a business on a company with a negative 60%+ operating margin is insane, either they will go bust or have to raise prices.
AWS by contrast makes money. Because of this, they can shave a point or two off margin to give (another) price reduction.
1TB per month cloudfront, 2M cloudfront functions etc etc. They are under almost NO financial pressure to raise rates.
Cloudflare is under pressure or will be. With VC money perhaps they will get a longer runway.
The "free" offerings are an old story by now.
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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…
I think I set an alert recently on AWS emailing me if I surpass a limit that I set. Have you checked out AWS console recently?
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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.
But the thought that not immediately reacting to an e-mail can cost me a month's salary or more is terrifying. Maybe it'll get waived. Maybe it'll be waived in the form of credit that I can only spend on the product (i.e. for my purposes, not waived). Maybe I'll be stuck with it. The "maybe" is the danger here.
Let's say I put some obscure 50 MB dataset into a public S3 bucket, and pay my Then someone builds a poorly made colab that downloads the entire dataset each time it is run, and the colab hits the front page of HN while I'm traveling, and makes it to social media the next day because it shows something funny. And people don't run it just once, they play with the parameters, running it multiple times.
By the time I'm back and see the e-mail, a 10000 USD bill may be waiting for me.
To obscure? How about this one:
The operator of a semi-popular website has decided to hate me. Each page load now contains an in the header, pointing to the biggest image I'm hosting for my small static website.
Edit: Even better example
I've accidentally left an API key in a git repo that I pushed online. My carefully set up billing alert was deleted, then my account started spun up as many of the most expensive GPU instances as quota would allow and started mining Monero. In this scenario, I think a $10000 bill would be "getting off easy".
(Just to be clear, these are hypothetical scenarios. If anyone knows how various cloud providers would react to those in practice, or if you know that there are countermeasures that would reliably stop them, please do tell!)
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.
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Yeah, but then you have to use Oracle
Can someone educate me on why Oracle is bad? I don’t have much experience with dealing with them as a company. Only used their database before.
[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/d1ttzp/oracle_is_...
[2]: https://upperedge.com/oracle/top-3-reasons-oracle-java-users...
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.
Off topic, but Oracle cloud's free tier never charges unless you upgrade your account. You can have 5 VMs, 200 GB block storage, etc.