Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

cloudirregular.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 457 posts

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

#291

Post by Havoc »

scarface74 wrote: post #173
ineedasername wrote: post #80

I don't understand why there isn't at least a setting that says "turn everything off if I hit $x." Then just given people a certain grace period to reactivate or get their data out before it's removed. It wouldn't fix production deployments where you want alarms, not a shutdown, when you hit spending caps, but it would help people on the dev stage to avoid issues like this.

So let’s say they “turn everything off”. Does that include deleting all of your objects in S3? Deleting your database? Deleting your attached disks (AMIs)? Deleting your DNS entries?

>Does that include deleting all of your objects in S3? Deleting your database? Deleting your attached disks (AMIs)? Deleting your DNS entries?

People bring this every time. You give a grace period and then yes - assuming the user opted into a "turn everything off".

Its not some impossible engineering feat & clouds are full of "out of money data gone" stuff already. e.g.

>If a paid subscription ends or is terminated, Microsoft retains customer data stored in Microsoft 365 in a limited-function account for 90 days to enable the subscriber to extract the data.

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

#292

Post by ungrateful-dead »

wingworks wrote: post #285
mcny wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had (have?) an Azure account through my university account and while I agree that Azure services such as Container Service are (in my not so humble opinion) ridiculously overpriced but the fact it I never entered payment details to use my USD 100 of free credit on Azure. I effectively have spending cap of zero dollars.

I thought I was the only one who thought pricing on Azure seemed rather high for what you get. But I also have free credit I can use each month, which offsets the cost to "normal" levels, but can't imagine being a business and opting to pay for Azure services by choice, unless they provide something no one else does.

I worked at mega corp and we used azure services at >50% off the sticker price

Enterprise deals can end up changing the story it seems

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

#293

Post by dragonwriter »

Havoc wrote: post #288
dragonwriter wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there seriously no way in AWS/Azure/GCP to specify "Here's my budget, shut everything down if I exceed $X"? All of them have billing APIs which should, in principal, allow you to build “Shutdown everything at some indefinite time interval (and additional spend) after I exceed $X”, though you’ll need to do nontrivial custom coding to tie together the various pieces to do it, and actually stopping all spend is lik…

>though you’ll need to do nontrivial custom coding to tie together the various pieces to do it, Let me guess...hosted on the cloud we're trying to shut down?

> Let me guess...hosted on the cloud we're trying to shut down?

It needs to consume APIs from that cloud, but there is no reason it would need to be hosted there.

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

#294

Post by wingworks »

ungrateful-dead wrote: post #292
wingworks wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought I was the only one who thought pricing on Azure seemed rather high for what you get. But I also have free credit I can use each month, which offsets the cost to "normal" levels, but can't imagine being a business and opting to pay for Azure services by choice, unless they provide something no one else does.

I worked at mega corp and we used azure services at >50% off the sticker price Enterprise deals can end up changing the story it seems

That would explain allot. Totally forgot big business usually gets big discounts.

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

#295

Post by Havoc »

StratusBen wrote: post #176

I'm Co-Founder of http://vantage.sh/ and we allow you to connect your AWS account(s) and we'll monitor cloud spend on your behalf. We send out regular cost report emails to try and help folks avoid situations like this and have some future plans around anomaly detection to try and help out in advance of things like this happening. I strongly encourage folks to sign up and let us monitor things on your behalf. We have…

Is it essentially read only / limited in some fashion by IAM? Wouldn't really want more things connected that open up more threat surface

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

#296

Post by KirillPanov »

dragonwriter wrote: post #254
KirillPanov wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the amount of compute resources and electricity that would be needed to power real time billing at AWS scale would be astronomical You don't have to bill in real time. You just have to provision funding for every resource except network bandwidth. Customer sets a monthly spend limit. Every time they start up an instance, create a volume, allocate an IP, or do anything else that costs money, you subtract the monthly…

> Customer sets a monthly spend limit. Every time they start up an instance, create a volume, allocate an IP, or do anything else that costs money, you subtract the monthly cost of that new thing from their spend limit. If the spend limit would go negative, you refuse to create the new resource. AWS systems are highly distributed; this kind of sharp billing cap would necessarily introduce a new strong consistency req…

> AWS systems are highly distributed

Hogwash, I tried to spin up 100 of your F1 instances in us-east-1 a week or two after they first became available, and found out about this thing called "limits".

Wherever you're enforcing the limit on max number of instances per region is already a synchronization point of exactly the sort needed here.

I'm sorry, this just doesn't pass the bullshit test. Resource allocation API calls are not even remotely close to lightning-quick. There is no fundamental immutable constraint here.

> For the motivating use case (avoiding a bill on the scale of even $200—possibly even $1—from a free-tier-eligible account),

Avoiding a $1 bill is definitely not the motivating use case.

A lot of people would be happy to have a mechanism that could prevent them from being billed 5x their expected expenditure (i.e. they set their budget limit to 5x what they intend to spend). It doesn't matter that that isn't perfect. It is massively better than what you're offering right now.

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

#297

Post by compsciphd »

20+ years ago I was offered a free 2 or 3 month subscription to compuserve. I was interested in it, as one could dial in as PPP account for internet access. So I configured my linux box to dial in and if the connection dropped, to redial.

After the 2nd month I get a huge multi hundred dollar bill. They claimed over the the 2 months I had used 2k-3k hours of time an their free months were limited to 750 hours a month of usage.

As I pointed out, that should be enough, as 24*31 = 744, so it should be impossible for me to use more than 750 hours a month.

They claimed that I must have been dialing in from multiple locations. I denied that and said they should have records of where I was calling in from. It took weeks for them to "forgive" the debt, without acknowledging that their billing was broken.

I always wondered how many other users got hurt because of this (my guess is not that many, as relatively few people were keeping their connection alive 24/7 via compuserve back in the 90s)

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

#298

Post by raverbashing »

I agree with most of the points brought there except for:

> I’ve personally got a dormant AWS account that’s charging me cents every month, and I bet you do too.

Hummm no? And if I have a charge line and I can try to chase it. It's not like that cent is nameless, it has a name and it has a way of figuring it out?

I mean, it can be not so obvious but it's not like it's totally opaque neither

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

#299

Post by circularfoyers »

pjanoman wrote: post #42
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…

Honestly I get lost inside of AWS. Only recently was I able to figure out why I was getting charged $.82/month which, in the long run, is really nothing. But it's amazing how hard it was to figure out why I was getting charged for something that I originally thought was just going to be free.

What did it turn out to be that was charging that?

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

#300

Post by Draken93 »

I am a student in the same age. When I wanted to start a hobby project I looked into the AWS free tier too. It is so unclear how the end costs come together that I decided to just leave AWS alone.

I rented a small cloud instance from HETZNER for ~ 3€/month and host everything myself. If I need a DBaaS I go with the MongoDB Atlas or ElephantSQL free tier.

I prefer constantly paying 3€, over a free account that breaks my neck if I miss something.

Post reply on HN