Live data from Hacker News

Amazon S3 will no longer charge for several HTTP error codes

aws.amazon.com

21–30 of 77 posts

Re: Amazon S3 will no longer charge for several HTTP error codes

#21
post #12

Can't imagine a change like this would be made without some analysis.. would love an internal view into a decision like this, I wonder if they already have log data to compute financial loss from the change, or if they have sampling instrumentation fancy enough to write/deploy custom reports like this quickly. In any case 2 weeks seems like an impressive turnaround for such a large service, unless they'd been interna…

Are you for real? Legitimately baffled by your comment. How about the financial losses of customers that could be DDoS-ed into bankruptcy through no fault of their own? Keeping S3 bucket names secret is not always easy.

I was thinking this too. You're giving AWS a lot of credit if you think they're not going to do some kind of analysis about how much they were making (albeit illegitimately) from invalid responses. I'm just surprised that they either didn't do the analysis beforehand or that if they did do the analysis beforehand (like the parent commenter suspected), how they were able to get the report for that analysis out so quickly.

Re: Amazon S3 will no longer charge for several HTTP error codes

#24

We've done it. Now let's re-engineer our apps to use error codes for 200 responses and get free S3 usage.

If I understand TFA, you'd need to find a way to get S3 (which offers no server-side script execution, only basic file delivery) to emit an error code (403 specifically) alongside a response of useful data. Good luck...

Re: Amazon S3 will no longer charge for several HTTP error codes

#25
post #5
post #3

The system works! Just raise your concerns and they'll get around to it in [checks notes] 18 years https://twitter.com/cperciva/status/1785402732976992417

In fairness, the issue was attended to within weeks after it recently got attention.

So, another way of saying this is, it took more than a decade to get attention?

Re: Amazon S3 will no longer charge for several HTTP error codes

#26
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fairness, the issue was attended to within weeks after it recently got attention.

So, another way of saying this is, it took more than a decade to get attention?

something something customer obsession

Re: Amazon S3 will no longer charge for several HTTP error codes

#27
post #6
post #3

The system works! Just raise your concerns and they'll get around to it in [checks notes] 18 years https://twitter.com/cperciva/status/1785402732976992417

You made more or less the exact same comment on a recent thread. What does it add to this conversation? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40221193

As an HN reader it added valuable context for me that I was unaware of.

Re: Amazon S3 will no longer charge for several HTTP error codes

#28
post #3

The system works! Just raise your concerns and they'll get around to it in [checks notes] 18 years https://twitter.com/cperciva/status/1785402732976992417

Ahh I see the problem. The steps to get it resolved were not to tell the team about it. The steps were to raise a big enough fuss that it would undermine customer trust if the team didn't fix it.

twitter support tier is the highest of all!

Re: Amazon S3 will no longer charge for several HTTP error codes

#29
post #12

Can't imagine a change like this would be made without some analysis.. would love an internal view into a decision like this, I wonder if they already have log data to compute financial loss from the change, or if they have sampling instrumentation fancy enough to write/deploy custom reports like this quickly. In any case 2 weeks seems like an impressive turnaround for such a large service, unless they'd been interna…

Are you for real? Legitimately baffled by your comment. How about the financial losses of customers that could be DDoS-ed into bankruptcy through no fault of their own? Keeping S3 bucket names secret is not always easy.

I prefer your version: Barr replies to a tweet before gatecrashing the next S3 planning session. "A customer is hurting, folks!". The call immediately falls silent with only occasional gasps heard from stunned engineers, and the gentle weeping of a PM. I wonder if Amazon offers free therapy following an incident like this

Re: Amazon S3 will no longer charge for several HTTP error codes

#30
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just searched for this and this documentation entry came up: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/aws-best-prac... I can't believe that their 'fix' is to set a wildcard dns entry, this feels somewhat like a joke. Does this mean that a NXDOMAIN response costs more than a successful response?

It has the same cost as a successful response which can quickly add up to a few hundred dollars per month with a couple of DNS enumeration scans. Google Cloud and Azure also bill DNS like this. Unless you need some of the advanced features you really shouldn't host your DNS in the big cloud providers.

Cloudflare don't bill like this, part of why I moved off route 53.
Post reply on HN