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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

#151

Post by donmcronald »

qaq wrote: post #121
Terretta wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I bet that's the case for the GP. They probably spend millions of dollars, so they get catered to and think it's the same treatment normal people get. I call it VIP vision. People don't even realize they're getting special treatment and assume their results are merit based rather than money based.

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

#152

Post by murgindrag »

rodgerd wrote: post #134
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).

The Oracle approach is:

- Good terms with proprietary lock-in.

- Milk that cow for all it's worth.

It's more nuanced than that -- I gave an oversimplified model -- but I've never seen anyone come out ahead doing business with Oracle long-term.

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

#153

Post by imwillofficial »

danpalmer wrote: post #88
varelse wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Single most obvious customer obsessed (their tenet BTW) feature they could add, but after over a decade of requests, it's seemingly clear they won't. It keeps me from playing with AWS for side projects as well. Their loss.

This is something that everyone seems to ask for (I know I'd love it), but they haven't implemented it. To me that suggests that they _can't_. My guess is that billing lags enough that they can't stick to a price cap, which means that they either have to guarantee the price cap and swallow the difference, which could be exploited by malicious users to get free compute, or they have to say that there's a delay on it w…

I’m on the Bill Computation Team for AWS, and this is exactly it. The work behind the scenes is insane. BillComp is the oldest and most brittle part of AWS. There are modernization efforts underway, so stay tuned.

Trust me, they hear you.

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

#154

Post by jjnoakes »

res0nat0r wrote: post #127
ramshanker wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

From all of the horror stories I've heard, it is not foolproof. For one, don't you get notified after the usage and charge happens? So one mistake that causes a large spike and the notification is too late.

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

#155

Post by jimsimmons »

3pt14159 wrote: post #138

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-upd…

I’m curious about infra of stock exchanges these days. Any resources you could point to? I’m especially curious how they handle sudden volatility and spike in trading. We usually talk about high frequency testing but very less about the infra that consumes all of those trades

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

#157

Post by layoric »

WaxProlix wrote: post #135
Sevii wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Undue burden" and good UX is a wide chasm. In the last few months of my last role we went from the 1 account to multiple separating environments and the additional cognitive load and extra work migrating was not trivial (plus trying to keep costs down duplicating things for migration).

I can see how starting with a pattern of "account per X" would create intuitive boundaries. When you say "per service" what kind of service do you mean? Business related web service API? AWS product? Other? Interested in what boundary line made sense for you given the large number of accounts you say you're happy with using.

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

#158

Post by michrassena »

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 probably what I find most frustrating about the way things are done now. I'd really like to get some idea of how these cloud services work. Every time I'm stopped by the concern that I'd rack up a huge bill and have to rely on the goodwill of a large corporation to have the debt forgiven.

I understand the role and the necessity for "the cloud", but it's a re-invention of the role of the mainframe. I hate seeing one of the most notable aspects of the microcomputer era go away which the ability of a motivated individual to gain computer skills using an individual's resources.

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

#160

Post by budhajeewa »

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.

Absolutely this! The uncertainty freaks me out. I don't have money to pay thousands of dollars as a result of some bug or attack.

I'm in love with DigitalOcean because you know the price you'd pay each month. If it's just 5 USD or 5000 USD, it's what you expected, nothing more.

I believe the rest of the clan (Linode, Vultr, etc.) give you the same certainty.

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