161–170 of 170 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well that's just rubbish. The whole idea of services like AWS is that it is scalable as a solution for startups, small businesses and large global corporations. Not just large corporations that would be considered customers of a "fancy" web services provider.
Sorry about that, I thought the ;) would have made it clear that this is a joke.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So basically you're complaining about pricing? Unlike other cloud providers, AWS has never had a price increase for a service. Just decreases. I guess 'customer obsession' would be giving away everything for free?
Customer obsession would be things like implementing bill caps on new account creation. Customer obsession would be NOT shipping buggy, unreliable software like AWS Amplify. Customer obsession would be CloudFormation-first. Customer obsession would be not forcing me to upgrade to a paid Support account to report a bug. The list goes on, unfortunately. I do believe AWS employees mean what they say, but the external re…
Customer obsession means not shipping bugs? OK, Bob, let's see your code.
CloudFormation is wonderful and essential. But AWS clearly optimizes for delivery speed. SOME service customers want Cloudformation from day 1. Others would rather have the API first, and have CFN a few months later.
It's very clear why they are not doing it. Putting the risk on you instead of themselves a) is better for them for obvious reasons, and b) makes it less likely for something bad to happen in the first place. Also, I can imagine clients worried about this are not the money-making kind of clients anyway.
And if you put it this way, I am not sure why this is not an illegal practice? Companies shouldn't discriminate the access to their services based on the level of anxiety you can handle.
It's very clear why they are not doing it. Putting the risk on you instead of themselves a) is better for them for obvious reasons, and b) makes it less likely for something bad to happen in the first place. Also, I can imagine clients worried about this are not the money-making kind of clients anyway.
And if you put it this way, I am not sure why this is not an illegal practice? Companies shouldn't discriminate the access to their services based on the level of anxiety you can handle.
I understand that designing a real-time billing system is near impossible. But couldn't Google/Amazon simply pretend they have real-time bill capping, and then simply swallow the costs incurred by any delays? Doesn't seem like rocket science, probably won't cost much, and might bring in new kinds of business (a lot of businesses won't allow most employees to sign an effectively blank check)
Now that I think about it, a third party could do this as well... except that if it were built in to AWS there would be much less friction.
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> Amazon just needs to keep track of usage, and start rate limiting/returning 402s/blocking writes when the monthly limit is hit. You're accruing costs even if you stop reading and writing. You're paying for the on-going storage, running of instances, etc. What you're describing does not implement what you're describing it as. E.g., It's the first day of the billing cycle, so our bill is effectively $0. So no limits…
You're twisting things. Amazon can alert you of the storage use and threaten to charge you in a few days, not a month. They can give you grace once per year so you're "on notice" after your first goof.
Billing alerts take two seconds to set up in CloudWatch.
If it's a legitimate goof, contact support and they've refunded me every time.
Glad we're all on the same page then and there's no problem here.
Also interested to hear exactly what part of what I said was "twisting" or misrepresenting the issue.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Amazon just needs to keep track of usage, and start rate limiting/returning 402s/blocking writes when the monthly limit is hit. You're accruing costs even if you stop reading and writing. You're paying for the on-going storage, running of instances, etc. What you're describing does not implement what you're describing it as. E.g., It's the first day of the billing cycle, so our bill is effectively $0. So no limits…
AWS doesn't run on a magical black box that eats customer money and spits out storage. They absolutely can eat some costs in a minority of cases in order to provide better service to customers (and I'm sure they already do in many other ways).
They provide billing estimates and billing data through CloudWatch metrics. This can be used to alert via SMS, email, and other methods. These can be used to trigger lambda functions to implement your own "shut it down" functionality quite easily in a way that actually makes sense for your workload.
What you seem to be advocating for is, more or less, a "pay what you want" model. If they're going to provide services and let you choose the maximum you're willing to pay and expect them to eat the rest, then I don't know how else to describe it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Customer obsession would be things like implementing bill caps on new account creation. Customer obsession would be NOT shipping buggy, unreliable software like AWS Amplify. Customer obsession would be CloudFormation-first. Customer obsession would be not forcing me to upgrade to a paid Support account to report a bug. The list goes on, unfortunately. I do believe AWS employees mean what they say, but the external re…
Bill caps sound great until you leave one on on a production system and your whole business comes crashing down during a spike in customer traffic. Customer obsession means not shipping bugs? OK, Bob, let's see your code. CloudFormation is wonderful and essential. But AWS clearly optimizes for delivery speed. SOME service customers want Cloudformation from day 1. Others would rather have the API first, and have CFN a…
Hence the "ask on account creation". If I want a dev account, I can choose to cap it. The amount of SMB that would benefit from this is staggering.
> Customer obsession means not shipping bugs? OK, Bob, let's see your code.
A major difference being that my company isn't worth $1T+.
I've used AWS for a long time and spoken at length with many wonderful, intelligent people in the company; and I didn't mean to tread on anyone's toes, I just wanted to express how it feels as a customer who spent >£150k/month for half a decade.