Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt • Hacker News Board

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

#321

Post by mschuster91 » Wed, May 05, 2021, 8:44 AM UTC

drewzero1 wrote: post #130

saurik wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if there is a human whose job is to final review suspensions and they just keep shaking their head at the measly pending $0.01 charge.

I keep a penny on my desk at work. Every time a coworker comes across somebody's account that is off by a penny, I offer it. They think I'm being funny, but the point I'm trying to make is that it wastes more than pennies worth of our time to spend it worrying about a few cents. I've seen people mail in checks worth less than the stamp it took to send them. It's a wild world out there.

The interesting thing is, accounts being off by a penny or two (excluding actions such as customers doing a mis-type in the bank transfer) can actually point to deeper issues such as improper rounding somewhere in the path.

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

#322

Post by ryan29 » Wed, May 05, 2021, 8:45 AM UTC

singlow wrote: post #235

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.

I don't understand why so many people want to use AWS for such small budgets. At that scale wouldn't it be easier to just build everything out of a few VMs at a cheap service? AWS is awesome when you have a large number of resources, that are created programmatically and reproducibly, with redundancy and duplicate environments. The budgeting tools are really amazing at letting you categorize your costs and create app…

> At that scale wouldn't it be easier to just build everything out of a few VMs at a cheap service?

No. I looked into AWS vs Azure vs Cloudflare vs Digital Ocean for something I'd like to build this year and (for my thing) Cloudflare (Workers) was the best balance of cost, scalability, and maintainability.

> I don't understand why so many people want to use AWS for such small budgets.

Serverless (I hate the term) makes a lot of sense for small budgets and projects. You're investing very little, so the downside of (severe) vendor lock-in is somewhat low. The upside is HA infrastructure, horizontal scalability, zero maintenance, ignorable monitoring (at least initially), consumption based costs, etc..

The biggest problem with all of them, except Digital Ocean, is that it's difficult to "own" your data in the sense that you can download a copy of a DB and keep using it somewhere else. IIRC Digital Ocean has a fairly nice managed PostgreSQL offering, but it still scales similar to a traditional DB (ie: not automatically).

The next biggest problem with AWS and Azure is that you can't figure out what anything costs, at least not easily. For example, I know for a page I'd want to serve via Cloudflare Workers, I could do 1 hit = 1 point read from Azure CosmosDB, but I couldn't figure out if the pricing includes egress. Just look at the pricing page for CosmosDB [1]. It's ridiculously complicated and that's one service on Azure.

1. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/cosmos-db/...

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

#323

Post by shever » Wed, May 05, 2021, 8:47 AM UTC

This. 100% this.

I have had issues with students doing the same thing, and I was being charged for dormant projects that I thought I'd deleted. AWS is a nightmare of an ecosystem to navigate.

The AWS Educate Starter Account is almost useless - especially if the student has to submit their project for external review - because it doesn't allow publicly accessible S3 buckets and has rotating credentials.

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

#324

Post by worble » Wed, May 05, 2021, 8:48 AM UTC

ryan29 wrote: post #302

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…

> Every other cloud does this! They all have non-production subscription types with hard spending limits. They don't. I've looked. They all have some ultra complex scheme for monitoring billing and programmatically shutting down services, which is a favorite recommendation by apologists, but none have a nice, solid "shut down everything" plan that's usable for learning and testing. AWS does have billing actions which…

Annoyingly, Azure does have this capability! If your company is a Microsoft gold partner (there might be other requirements, I can't remember) then your Azure developer licenses comes with £100 free credit per month. When this money runs out, every service associated with that subscription just shuts down. It doesn't overrun, heck I don't remember even getting an email about it, they just stop until it renews the next month.

They just refuse to implement this system for non dev licenses.

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

#325

Post by merb » Wed, May 05, 2021, 8:50 AM UTC

ryan29 wrote: post #302

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…

> Every other cloud does this! They all have non-production subscription types with hard spending limits. They don't. I've looked. They all have some ultra complex scheme for monitoring billing and programmatically shutting down services, which is a favorite recommendation by apologists, but none have a nice, solid "shut down everything" plan that's usable for learning and testing. AWS does have billing actions which…

btw. azure has a subscription type where you can put a prepaid amount onto your account. they just do not support it by default. btw. bizspark customers get this of subscription, for 3 years with an free amount of up to 300 USD per month

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

#326

Post by anothernewdude » Wed, May 05, 2021, 8:54 AM UTC

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…

My business uses off-cloud backups, devops and prepaid credit cards to limit our risk exposure.

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

#327

Post by ryan29 » Wed, May 05, 2021, 9:03 AM UTC

NullPrefix wrote: post #28

HomeDeLaPot wrote: post #19

Is there seriously no way in AWS/Azure/GCP to specify "Here's my budget, shut everything down if I exceed $X"? I don't use those platforms much but was always surprised I couldn't find anything like that right off the bat. I'll build cloud stuff if it makes sense at work, but if I'm footing the bill I'll stick to something that can provide an actual upper limit.

IIRC the excuse is that billing is a separate department and they count all the usage dollars way after you done using it, not in realtime. You would still be able to go over your limit and then who should foot the bill? Realtime counting would be too difficult to figure out, our brightest minds are busy figuring out engagement metrics.

> You would still be able to go over your limit and then who should foot the bill?

The provider. What they do wouldn't be accepted in any other industry. Imagine hiring an appliance repair shop who sends a repair person that can fix your stuff immediately, but can't tell you what it's going to cost until 3 days after the work is done.

Then you get a huge bill because you wanted "appliance repair" (one of them), but ended up with "appliance maintenance" (all of them).

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

#328

Post by watt » Wed, May 05, 2021, 9:06 AM UTC

jsmith99 wrote: post #307

jonas21 wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can write a cloud function to automatically run when you go over the budget and shut down billing. They provide code for doing so in the docs: https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/notify#cap_disa... I'm not sure if that's what you meant by "manually catching a pubsub" -- you have to manually set up the script once, but it will run automatically when triggered.

AWS has that too - you can trigger actions on budget alerts such as stopping activity https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws-cost-management/get-started...

What we need, a function that is AWS maintained and supported, that basically is AWS responsibility - that if it did not work - failed to shut down service that was consuming all the budget, they eat the cost.

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

#329

Post by putsjoe » Wed, May 05, 2021, 9:12 AM UTC

I don't get why AWS doesn't offer preloading credit. Surely charging your card 1 cent a month isn't worth the time.

Whereas if they allowed customers to load on an amount, even a direct debit, their card processing fees would go down and customers would just get cut off when they run out of credit.

I suppose a counter argument to this is that it's hard for AWS to keep a constant eye on how much a service is costing. In which case we're back to the same argument as spending limits.

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

#330

Post by ryan29 » Wed, May 05, 2021, 9:19 AM UTC

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?

Sure. I'd enable that on dev / testing accounts without hesitation. I don't know why so many people pretend like everyone will be forced into getting resources deleted if there's an option of a hard limit. You can have multiple accounts. They even recommend it.

It makes way more sense for me to build my stuff using a dev/testing account. After that I'll have a good enough understanding of the resources I'm using that it's practical for me to configure more complicated cost controls using a production account.

It's not all or none.