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Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

cloudirregular.substack.com

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Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#201

Post by murukesh_s »

dotproto wrote: post #89
paaakthecaaa wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They definitely need a senior executive to stand up and say, "The Customer wants us to be transparent in billing, fix that now." Then they need to start a team dedicated to finding a good way to let customers halt spending at a given limit with minimal impact on their operations. They already win on UX (okay, okay, it's an opinion ffs), but unlimited liability makes a lot of people very uncomfortable. Those two actio…

"They already win on UX" As someone that has tried and failed to get some small personal sites running on AWS a couple times, I'm going to have to tag this snippet with [citation needed].

agreed especially when compared to say Heroku or Digital ocean. I see many new comers struggling to deploy a small website. It's overwhelming. I understand that Heroku exists for such users and they are using AWS under the hood, but is there any service which takes AWS cloud APIs and simplifies it with a leaner UX?

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#202

Post by kempbellt »

thejosh wrote: post #115
artichokeheart wrote: post #24

AWS employs cost obfuscation by design otherwise the default view when you open the console would show you all of your current active services. Not only is that not the case, a single screen to show you all of your current active services doesn't exist. You need to take a deep dive into cost explorer (assuming you have access in corporate land) and try to decipher in what that all means.

Why the f do I have to use a service like billgist to get a breakdown of my services? AWS billing IS complicated but could be made so much simpler...

I'll bite...

Because, if you are a company that uses AWS at scale (deploying literally thousands of resources at a time), you care more about meeting demand and getting resources to spec, than you do about the cost of an individual elastic IP...

The price of each individual resource isn't something that you want to see on every screen you touch. It literally clutters the console with information that you couldn't give a shit about when your company is making millions (or billions) on the services you provide. You care more about your service's reliability/scalability/uptime/etc than anything else. This is priority numero uno.

If and when cost analysis becomes priority, you look to see where you may be overprovisioning resources - hence, the billing console.

But for the larger players on AWS (the multi-billion dollar ones that AWS cares more about making happy than you or I), an extra $100k in AWS expenses in a year isn't a worry, it's a write-off.

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#203

Post by amanzi »

dinkleberg wrote: post #164
jiggawatts wrote: post #136

Everyone: PLEASE stop making the argument that it's "too hard" or even "impossible" to implement spending limits. As the article points out: Every other cloud does this! They all have non-production subscription types with hard spending limits. There's a difference between "unable" and "unwilling". The people that refuse to understand the difference are the same people that don't understand that "unsupported" isn't s…

Which clouds do this? I work quite a bit with AWS and GCP, and Azure to a lesser extent, and I've yet to see a spending limit on any of them. I'd love to be proven wrong though.

Azure definitely has subscription types that have payment limits. I have one subscription that has some credits on it, and if I go over the limits all services are suspended (i.e. compute, storage, etc) and I can't do anything unless I add more money or wait until the next period starts and the new credits kick in.

Not all Azure subscriptions types are like this though.

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#204

Post by harrisonjackson »

nemothekid wrote: post #54

> “It’s the student’s responsibility to know what they’re deploying.” Anyone who seriously argues this is 100% unaware of the quagmire that is AWS billing. There are companies with entire teams built around just optimizing AWS billing - it's whole unsurprising that some AWS feature actually spun up 5 separate AWS features that end up being billed.

And even when you spin things up knowing their cost you may not be accounting for data transfer, storage, mismatched reserved instance purchases, unused EIPs, and so many more "hidden costs"

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#205

Post by [deleted] »

ActorNightly wrote: post #144
nemothekid wrote: post #54

> “It’s the student’s responsibility to know what they’re deploying.” Anyone who seriously argues this is 100% unaware of the quagmire that is AWS billing. There are companies with entire teams built around just optimizing AWS billing - it's whole unsurprising that some AWS feature actually spun up 5 separate AWS features that end up being billed.

Ill seriously argue this. The issue is that when students are "learning" "cloud", they are not really learning cloud as much as following tutorials to click together turnkey solutions. Dynamo DB, ElasicSearch, and whatever else are all business-oriented, quick to set up services. And such, these services are hiding what is going on underneath, with the expectation that the company will cover the costs of whatever tho…

[deleted]

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#206

Post by macintux »

cookguyruffles wrote: post #8

Arguably discovering surprise bills absolutely should be part of the free tier, how else can you mentally prepare for running something in production on AWS?

If someone told me about a cool new programming language and to teach myself how to use it could either be free or maybe $5000 because infinite loops are expensive, am I going to learn it? Hell no.

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#207

Post by SilasX »

dotproto wrote: post #89
paaakthecaaa wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They definitely need a senior executive to stand up and say, "The Customer wants us to be transparent in billing, fix that now." Then they need to start a team dedicated to finding a good way to let customers halt spending at a given limit with minimal impact on their operations. They already win on UX (okay, okay, it's an opinion ffs), but unlimited liability makes a lot of people very uncomfortable. Those two actio…

"They already win on UX" As someone that has tried and failed to get some small personal sites running on AWS a couple times, I'm going to have to tag this snippet with [citation needed].

Oh man, I have long been joking about the AWS UI. Like how it will gladly walk you through all the steps for launching a server and only at the very last step says “oh you don’t have permission to do that lol, get permission and start over”.

I compared[1] it to a bartender who walks you through an entire sale and only at the last second rejects your purchase for being underage (instead of denying you the at the initial request for something alcoholic).

Of course, that’s one of the minor things in the grand scheme.

[1] http://blog.tyrannyofthemouse.com/2016/02/some-of-my-geeky-t...

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#208

Post by crmd »

czgs2woh4ue3 wrote: post #156
NathanKP wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my personal opinion, though I do work at AWS: It's not that real time counting is difficult, it is that the amount of compute resources and electricity that would be needed to power real time billing at AWS scale would be astronomical. There is a reason why banks and financial institutions generally do batch processing in the off peak hours when electricity is cheaper and there is less demand for the compute…

I also work at AWS (nowhere near billing), so the usual disclaimers apply, but: I actually have no idea if billing is real-time or not? I think it's mostly batch, but the records aren't necessarily, though they may be aggregated a bit. The general point in this thread certainly holds: our systems provide service first, bill second, and that by throwing a record over the wall to some other internal system. It's not un…

There’s a lot of middle ground between credit limit checks within every database transaction and the current state.

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#209

Post by throwawaydg »

We were inexperienced, got picked up by a tiny VC and funded for a few thousand. We applied and got accepted into the Digital Ocean Hatch program, they threw $100,000 in credits at us to help us succeed.

We tried to exhaust the supply—one day the credits vanished. I was getting married that month, and it took that long to accrue a life-changing amount of real dollar debt. I sent a quick email asking DO to extend the credits. The last email I got from them was that "we expect you pay the full amount".

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#210

Post by xtracto »

eric4smith wrote: post #6

Yup. Got charged over $800 for "experimenting" with a DynamoDB database and forgetting to delete it afterwards. Sure, I called customer support and they reversed the charges. But something the nice lady on the other end said as she chuckled: "This happens all the time". DigitalOcean is the worst with the dormant accounts. Just got dinged around $2.40 on my credit card. Going into DO I could not find what was causing…

I have a DO server thats been running for more rhan 5 years. It was the basic $5 bucks instance they offered at the time I felt a bit robbed a couple of days ago when I was spinning another instance and I saw that the newer $5 instance has more memory and more cpu power. I feel like they should have decreases the cost of the older less performant instance.

I have been spoiled by my Internet provider who year after year they will automatically increase my speed as they made it cheaper, as I paid the same amount for the service.

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