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Serverless Horrors

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Re: Serverless Horrors

#161

Post by cuu508 »

interloxia wrote: post #77
trcf22 wrote: post #2

After a quick check on Vercel stories, it seems all payments were discarded or mistakes in the first place. Does it really happen to really have to pay such a bill? Do you need to tweet about it to be reimbursed?

Someone at a community group I'm in messed up playing with Azure through their free for non-profits offering^. We were out about 1.2k€. Not huge but huge for us. Encouraged by comments on HN over the years I had them ask support to kindly to wave it. After repeating the request a few times they eventually reduced their bill to So even without shaming on social media, But it probably depends. It's worth at least askin…

It's waive, not wave

Re: Serverless Horrors

#162

Post by Bluecobra »

stressback wrote: post #121

I read a lot of the posts at the little blog here and, uh, every single one sounds like a complete amateur making a cloud configuration mistake. I haven't found one that is the provider's fault or the fault of "serverless" I would be embarrassed to put my name on these posts admitting I can't handle my configs while blaming everyone but myself. Serverless isn't a horror, serverlesshorrors poster. You are the horror.…

That being said, the cloud providers could do a better job explaining to new/naive users that great power comes with great responsibility and there is no hand holding. Someone might be more hesitant to willy nilly spin up something if a wizard estimates that the maximum cost could be $X per month.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#163

Post by franktankbank »

VectorLock wrote: post #147
franktankbank wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what world is that not the preferable solution? Want to know if your shit is actually robust just set your cap and ddos yourself as the first test of you architecture.

Yes, a sign of resilient architecture is to shut down when it encounters some stress.

Consider it like a crumple zone in a car.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#164

Post by exe34 »

bee_rider wrote: post #122
appreciatorBus wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These aren’t limits though, they are just budget notifications. What would be helpful, would be if when you set up your account there was a default limit – as in an actual limit, where all projects stop working once you go over it - of some sane amount like $5 or $50 or even $500. I have a handful of toy projects on AWS and Google cloud. On both I have budgets set up at $1 and $10, with notifications at 10% 50% and 9…

I’ve accidentally hit myself with a bigger than expected AWS bill (just $500 but as a student I didn’t really want to spend that much). So I get being annoyed with the pricing model. But, I don’t think the idea of just stopping charging works. For example, I had some of their machine image thingies (AMI) on my account. They charged me less than a dollar a month, totally reasonable. The only reasonable interpretation…

> But, I don’t think the idea of just stopping charging works.

I'm sorry but this is complete bullshit. they can set a default limit of 1 trillion dollars and give us the option to drop it to $5. there's a good reason they won't do it, but it's not this bullshit claim that's always bandied about.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#166

Post by randallsquared »

mikeocool wrote: post #124
phoenixhaber wrote: post #43

When I was learning to program through a bootcamp I spun up an elastic beanstalk instance that was free but required a credit card to prove your identity. No problem that makes sense - it's an easy way to prove authentication as a bot can't spam a credit card (or else it would be financial fraud and most likely a felony). Amazon then charged me one hundred thousand dollars as the server was hit by bot spam. I had the…

> I had them refund the bill (as in how am I going to pay it?) but to this day I've hated Amazon with a passion They refunded you $100k with few questions asked, and you hate them for it? I’ve made a few expensive mistakes on AWS that were entirely my fault, and AWS has always refunded me for them. I imagine if Amazon did implement “shut every down when I exceed my budget” there’d be a bunch of horror stories like “I…

> They refunded you $100k with few questions asked, and you hate them for it?

They exposed him to 100K of liability without any way to avoid it (other than to avoid AWS entirely), and then happened to blink, in this case, with no guarantee that it would happen again. If you don't happen to have a few hundred thousand liquid, suddenly getting a bill for 100K might well be a life-ruiningly stressful event.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#167

Post by mdaniel »

fnord77 wrote: post #58

looking forward to the "LLM token horrors" version

I thought there was an OWASP for "denial of wallet" vulnerabilities but this link was the closest one I found https://www.prompt.security/vulnerabilities/denial-of-wallet... (although the link makes it sound like they're offering denials)

Re: Serverless Horrors

#168

Post by LeifCarrotson »

VectorLock wrote: post #144
phoenixhaber wrote: post #43

When I was learning to program through a bootcamp I spun up an elastic beanstalk instance that was free but required a credit card to prove your identity. No problem that makes sense - it's an easy way to prove authentication as a bot can't spam a credit card (or else it would be financial fraud and most likely a felony). Amazon then charged me one hundred thousand dollars as the server was hit by bot spam. I had the…

Amazon refunded you and you hate them for it? I think one of the reasons I appreciate AWS so much is that any time there has been snafu that led to a huge bill like this they've made it pretty painless to get a refund- just like you experienced.

As the saying goes, when you owe the bank $100 you've got a problem, when you owe the bank $100k the bank has a problem...

On serverless, I can enter numbers in a calculator and guess that running my little toy demo app on AWS will cost between $1 and $100. Getting hit with a huge $1000 bill and a refusal to refund the charges (and revocation of my Prime account and a lifetime ban from AWS and cancellation of any other services I might otherwise run there) would be totally possible, but I have zero control over that. Expecting to go on social media begging for a refund is not a plan, it's evidence of a broken system - kinda like those "heartwarming" posts about poor people starting a GoFundMe so their child can afford cancer treatment. No, that's awful, can we just be sensible instead?

If a server would have cost me $20 at a VPS provider to keep a machine online 24/7 that was at 1% utilization most of the time and was terribly laggy or crashed when it went viral, that's what $20 buys you.

But, you say, analysis of acttual traffic says that serverless would only cost me $10 including scaling for the spike, in which case that's a fantastic deal. Half price! Or maybe it would be $100, 5x the price. I have no way of knowing in advance.

It's just not worth the risk.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#169

Post by cjbgkagh »

Nextgrid wrote: post #100
cjbgkagh wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve not read the fine print but I’d be worried that there would be something in there that allows this.

There are light-years between what a company thinks their ToS “allow” and what a court would actually determine is allowed. Plenty of ToS clauses in major contracts are unenforceable by law. In this situation if it were to actually go to court I’d expect the actual bill to get significantly reduced at the very least. But because it’s a completely bullshit charge based on bandwidth usage (which costs them nothing) it…

Courts can be rather capricious, I’d rather avoid them as best as possible, even if you are likely to win having to fight something like this in court is punishing.
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