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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

#171

Post by altrum »

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 worked on this feature when I was at Amazon—and the demographic we were after were mostly government & some non-profit organizations. The biggest thing with these orgs were that they _needed_ to have a clear and structured per-month budget over a long period (~year) OR they had to use up their funds before their grants “expired”

Also on a technical note, this allowed for some nice internal data models/patterns that could be utilized in further use-cases

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

#172

Post by Rd6n6 »

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.

Can you not get charged for bandwidth overages? What happens if you use 3x your transfer limit?

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

#173

Post by withinboredom »

ValentineC wrote: post #140
withinboredom wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We still use bare-metal at Automattic. All our global-scale admin stuff is open source... it shouldn't be surprising that bash scripts aren't all that interesting. People want it written in Go, with Raft-consensus to think for us humans, running on blockchain.

Are they published somewhere on https://github.com/Automattic ?

No, it all predates git/Github: https://code.svn.wordpress.org/servermattic/README

If you go up a few levels you can find more interesting things as well...

Someone wrote an good tutorial on using it here: https://codeseekah.com/2012/03/19/cross-server-deployment-wi...

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

#174

Post by CSDude »

snapcaster wrote: post #143
scrollaway wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I run at AWS for 5 years and use more than 25 services and keep an eye at a huge sum very carefully year never seen this happening so it's pretty extraordinary for me. I dont ever remember AWS increasing prices for any service at all.

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

#175

Post by speleding »

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...

Our bank recently started charging us negative interest on any balance over €150K in our checking account. So I wouldn't mind pre-paying a bit if the balance gets too high. Alas, it seems this is US only for now.

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

#176

Post by scrollaway »

snapcaster wrote: post #143
scrollaway wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It really is. AWS never increases prices, let alone retroactively. They make such massive margins where they do make money they absolutely do not need to use underhanded tactics to milk their customers who are more than happy to hand out money of their own volition.

They give out hundreds of thousands of dollars in credit just so you can use their crack.

The GP's comment's claim isn't just extraordinary, it's out there with "I saw aliens and they probed me". Possible? Physically, yes. Unlikely? Quite the understatement.

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

#177

Post by res0nat0r »

jjnoakes wrote: post #154
res0nat0r wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is true, it isn't really possible to get a near instantaneous real-time feed of every single charge from all of the different AWS services you may be using, because they are all unrelated and do their logging / billing differently. IE EC2 will scrape and upload your iptables data-usage info to s3 and then that will get scraped and generated into a daily billing/money report etc, and there are thousands of things such as this between all of AWS services.

This likely will just alert you somewhat quickly after something has spiked and been running for a number of hours/day, most likely.

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

#178

Post by ksec »

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.

Oh I have been thinking about something similar as well. Basically a I buy a single HTML page that will last at least 20-30 years.

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

#179

Post by baby »

bdibs wrote: post #159
baby wrote: post #156

How is what AWS doing legal btw? How can they charge people without limits? Isn’t this abusive?

How is that abusive? You pay for what you use and that’s it.

If you make a mistake you can be down one million dollar when you wake up

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

#180

Post by 3pt14159 »

jimsimmons wrote: post #155
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

I'm under a couple strict NDAs, unfortunately, and I didn't work on the trading engine, just software around piping giant amounts of data around to a ton of consumers. But the stuff I worked on heavily utilized AWS wherever possible and the emphasis was on prioritization. No matter what it did to the code, if high priority data came in the swarm of computers had to switch to it as soon as possible.
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