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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

#161

Post by mr_toad »

michrassena wrote: post #158
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 seei…

> a re-invention of the role of the mainframe.

A publicly accessible mainframe, where anyone anywhere in the world can script the provision of machines and other resources with little more than terminal and a text editor.

That would have been utopian science fiction in the heyday of the mainframe.

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

#162

Post by mr_toad »

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.

Licenses are a major PITA when you want to be spinning machines up and down all the time. Some enterprise vendors have pay as you go solutions, but many don’t.

I get the impression that some enterprise vendors don’t offer pay as you go solutions because it would put their sales staff out of work, and because they wouldn’t be able to use a “how much can you afford?” pricing model.

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

#163

Post by glenngillen »

vbezhenar wrote: post #142
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.

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…

I used to work at AWS, and my experience helping customers with these types of issues was almost without exception a credit/refund would be applied for any honest mistake that had corrective or preventative steps already in flight.

I say almost without exception, because the one case that wasn’t true was a Glacier transfer case like you described (except an order of magnitude larger in cost). We made it right for the customer in other ways. But I’m still seething years later about how poor and experience it was and how uncharacteristically unmoving and not customer obsessed whatever the decision making chain were on that particular issue. Just wanted to let you know you’re not alone, and it’s not just customers that had a bad taste from that experience.

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

#164

Post by closeparen »

Silhouette wrote: post #132
closeparen wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 architect…

Technology is a good business because a small labor input can scale to a very large impact. I'm sure there is a place for consultancy but I don't see it winning against "scale" in the long term.

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

#165

Post by gchamonlive »

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 not to be dismissed. AWS billing is too opaque[1] and a misconfigured or buggy plugin can very well trigger resources infinitely[2] to a big nasty surprise.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21694835

[2] https://wordpress.org/support/topic/amazon-cloudfront-invali...

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

#166

Post by dabinat »

AWS’s on demand pricing is high but their reserved pricing doesn’t leave a lot of flexibility.

Why is it just 1 or 3 years? What if I only need it for 6 months or 2 years? Can’t I just get a discount proportional to a custom length of time?

Why can’t I choose the amount of money I want to pay under the “partial upfront” option?

Why can I only reserve some AWS services and not others? Why can’t I reserve a certain amount of S3 storage for example?

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

#167

Post by Spooky23 »

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…

Many people shit on GCP, but this is an area where they really shine.

You can set budgets by project and easily allocate costs and address accountability issues across teams or products.

The value depends on how you operate.

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

#168

Post by bradknowles »

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...

This add on is highly recommended inside of Amazon and AWS, too.

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

#169

Post by bradknowles »

jsperx wrote: post #83
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…

With one giant caveat imho — I have a root account, an admin account, a common account (load balancer, database) and then customer-specific accounts. Was working great, using Terraform for consistency, sharing VPC where made sense, etc… until I had an issue and realized that my paid support plan only covered the root account. From what I understand you have to get a separate support plan, with a paid minimum ($100 pe…

If you roll them all up into one Organization, then everything should be properly aggregated.

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

#170

Post by emodendroket »

layoric wrote: post #157
WaxProlix wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I would say one account per business-related Web service, per stage, is a sensible way to break it up. That gives you some visibility into what services are talking to what other services, logical cost breakdowns, and access controls pretty much where you'd want them.
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