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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

#141

Post by ctvo »

onion2k wrote: post #117
ctvo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm sorry, what?

> AWS's unknowable policy for the cost of errors represents a huge risk for individuals and small businesses.

Assume you're paying for your own mistakes, and be thankful when you don't have to? That's a pretty easy policy.

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

#142

Post by vbezhenar »

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.

I made a mistake with glacier (old transfer pricing model was horribly unobvious, I think that they changed it since then) which costed me few hundred bucks instead of expected few pennies. I asked for refund, because I read about people in the same situation being refunded but all I got from support is pricing page and FAQ link. I don't expect any goodwill from Amazon, I'm not the kind of person who would fight over refund, so I just paid and forgot about it, but had some bad taste in my mouth.

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

#143

Post by snapcaster »

scrollaway wrote: post #80
toeknee123 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We recently helped a small client of ours discover a cost increase where AWS RETROACTIVELY increased their costs for a service near the end of the month for previous days without letting them know. We were a bit shocked to see this happen and it was a very subtle increase that was sort of hidden in Cost Explorer unless you spent hours digging into it and comparing your past invoices. (I'm a co-founder of CloudForecas…

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

I don't think it's an extraordinary claim but some evidence would be nice because the comment made me paranoid

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

#144

Post by vbezhenar »

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...

I like those kinds of services for personal projects. I don't always have enough money on my bank card and I'm lazy to go to ATM to fill my card with cash, so those monthly payments could be missed very easily. If that leads to service disruption, it's very annoying. It's much easier to load a balance for year and forget about it until next year.

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

#145

Post by veonik »

kelp wrote: post #137
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…

Did you contact support in either event? Just curious if they were at all willing to adjust your bill.

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

#146

Post by coredog64 »

nprateem wrote: post #99
jsperx wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was so happy when I finally got cross-account roles working so I could use a nice drop down and seamlessly switch between my accounts. So cool! Then I learned because they’re saving it all browser-side I had to rebuild the whole menu whenever I first used a new browser or computer? Whaaaat? Of all people, AWS console users have to be highly likely to be using multiple devices/browsers. Having to recreate your own p…

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/aws-extend-sw...

Second this recommendation. Our TAM suggested it and it works great. You can even install the Chrome plugin in the Edge browser.

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

#147

Post by coredog64 »

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?

For AWS, blast radius includes things like “developer fucked up on using SSM and exceeded the rate limit for the entire account”. Or “developer failed to set API Gateway rate limit on their trivial app and brought down everything else in the account”

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

#148

Post by ryan29 »

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 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.

That's exactly how it should work. It would even be useful if I could designate my development / testing account as unimportant by default so everything can be nuked to limit spending.

I think it's the kind of thing that will only be solved by regulation. The government needs to institute the concept of capped overages for cloud providers where if I set my budget to $100 / month they aren't allowed to send me a 100x bill for $10k.

Here's the 9 year old request for the same thing on Azure.

https://feedback.azure.com/forums/170030-signup-and-billing/...

I politely asked @AzureSupport (on Twitter) if they could have someone provide an update, but they didn't deliver on their promise to follow up :-(

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

#149

Post by Frost1x »

StratusBen wrote: post #53

I'm surprised it took this long for AWS to launch something as basic as this. As others in the thread have mentioned, the core problem of tracking your AWS costs and where they're coming from is still a very hard problem for most organizations. Especially startups. I'm a co-founder of https://www.vantage.sh/ which helps organizations track their AWS costs and we'll look at incorporating Advance Pay balances into the…

>I'm surprised it took this long for AWS to launch something as basic as this.

I'm not surprised. I'm convinced AWS has strategically focused on making costs difficult to keep on top of so you just pick a service, assume it's magically cost optimized for you and use it even though that's not reality.

Side note, I love the Vantage EC2 instance comparison chart, I've used it a few times recently and it made my life so much easier. Thank you and your team(s) for providing this freely and publicly: https://instances.vantage.sh/

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

#150

Post by shepherdjerred »

015a wrote: post #104
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.

No. S3, like most AWS services, has uncapped costs. If you experience higher than expected load, such as a DDoS attempt, you'll burn through the preallocated spend and you'll still get a bill afterward. This doesn't appear to actually shut down the resources once the preallocated spend is exhausted. Its just a way to pay for bills preemptively instead of when you receive them. Its an accounting thing, not a new featu…

Just put your S3 bucket behind a CloudFront CDN and you're golden :)
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