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Serverless Horrors

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Re: Serverless Horrors

#371

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

ipaddr wrote: post #367
scarface_74 wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So tell me again who we need a law? Can you cite one instance where any of the cloud providers refused to give a refund to someone?

The person who signs up for the free tier and is charged. https://medium.com/%40akshay.kannan.email/amazon-is-refusing...

There is no such thing as “signing up for a free tier” at least there wasn’t before July of this year. Some services have free tiers for a certain amount of time and others have an unlimited free tier that resets every month.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#372

Post by khromov »

petralithic wrote: post #178

This is some good marketing for Coolify, which the author makes as an open source platform as a service. I prefer Dokploy these days though, since it seems to be less buggy, as Coolify seems to have such bugs due to being on PHP. https://coolify.io/ https://dokploy.com/

CapRover is another good alternative, and also much more lightweight than Coolify, easily runs on even a 512MB server: https://caprover.com/

Re: Serverless Horrors

#373

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

Bjartr wrote: post #301
JustExAWS wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never in 8 years of being in the AWS ecosystem and reading forums and Reddits on the internet had anyone report that AWS wouldn’t refund their money. If you go over your budget with AWS, what should AWS do automatically? Delete your objects from S3? Terminate your databases and EC2 instances? Besides, billing data collection doesn’t happen anywhere near realtime, consider it a fire hose of streaming data that…

Provide the user the tools to make these choices. Give the option to explicitly choose how durable to extreme traffic you want to be. Have the free tier default to "not very durable"

You mean like having a billing alert send an event that allows you to trigger custom actions to turn things off? That already exists. It has for years.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#374

Post by jiggawatts »

I keep telling customers: "The cloud will scale to the size of your wallet."

They don't understand what I mean by that. That's okay, they'll learn!

Anyway, this kind of thing comes up regularly on Hacker News, so let's just short-circuit some of the conversations:

"You can set a budget!" -- that's just a warning.

"You should watch the billing data more closely!" -- it is delayed up to 48 hours or even longer on most cloud services. It is especially slow on the ones that tend to be hit the hardest during a DDoS, like CDN services.

"You can set up a lambda/function/trigger to stop your services" -- sure, for each individual service, separately, because the "stop" APIs are different, if they exist at all. Did I mention the 48 hour delay?

"You can get a refund!" -- sometimes, with no hard and fast rules about when this applies except for out of the goodness of some anonymous support person's heart.

"Lots of business services can have unlimited bills" -- not like this where buying what you thought was "an icecream cone" can turn into a firehouse of gelato costing $1,000 per minute because your kid cried and said he wanted more.

"It would be impossible for to put guardrails like that on their services!" -- they do exactly that, but only when it's their money at risk. When they could have unlimited expenses with no upside, then suddenly, magically, they find a way. E.g.: See the Azure Visual Studio Subscriber accounts, which have actual hard limits.

"Why would you want your cloud provider to stop your business? What if you suddenly go viral! That's the last thing you'd want!" -- who said anything about a business? What if it's just training? What if your website is just marketing with a no "profit per view" in any direct sense?

Re: Serverless Horrors

#375

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

randallsquared wrote: post #166
mikeocool wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I had them refund the bill (as in how am I going to pay it?) but to this day I've hated Amazon with a passion They refunded you $100k with few questions asked, and you hate them for it? I’ve made a few expensive mistakes on AWS that were entirely my fault, and AWS has always refunded me for them. I imagine if Amazon did implement “shut every down when I exceed my budget” there’d be a bunch of horror stories like “I…

> They refunded you $100k with few questions asked, and you hate them for it? They exposed him to 100K of liability without any way to avoid it (other than to avoid AWS entirely), and then happened to blink, in this case, with no guarantee that it would happen again. If you don't happen to have a few hundred thousand liquid, suddenly getting a bill for 100K might well be a life-ruiningly stressful event.

Yes, he could have set up a billing alert that triggered an action to shut everything down. Easy way is to take away privileges from the IAM roles attached to the processes.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#376

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

zdragnar wrote: post #106
motorest wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When I was learning to program through a bootcamp I spun up an elastic beanstalk instance that was free but required a credit card to prove your identity. Is it just me or is this just a cheap excuse to grab a payment method from unsuspecting free-tier users?

AWS services aren't designed for people just learning to program. Beanstalk and other services have billing limits you can set, but those aren't hard limits because they are measured async to keep performance up. With that said, AWS is notoriously opaque in terms of "how much will I pay for this service" because they bill so many variable facets of things, and I've never really trusted the free tier myself unless I m…

As does Lightsail…

Re: Serverless Horrors

#377

Post by nothrabannosir »

phoenixhaber wrote: post #43

When I was learning to program through a bootcamp I spun up an elastic beanstalk instance that was free but required a credit card to prove your identity. No problem that makes sense - it's an easy way to prove authentication as a bot can't spam a credit card (or else it would be financial fraud and most likely a felony). Amazon then charged me one hundred thousand dollars as the server was hit by bot spam. I had the…

Not that Amazon needs any defending, but for anyone running a bootcamp: this is a good reason to start with services like Heroku. They make this type of mistake much harder to make. They're very beginner friendly compared to raw AWS.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#378

Post by damontal »

alkonaut wrote: post #185
phoenixhaber wrote: post #43

When I was learning to program through a bootcamp I spun up an elastic beanstalk instance that was free but required a credit card to prove your identity. No problem that makes sense - it's an easy way to prove authentication as a bot can't spam a credit card (or else it would be financial fraud and most likely a felony). Amazon then charged me one hundred thousand dollars as the server was hit by bot spam. I had the…

I would never use a cloud service that doesn't let me set a hard cap for any service. Not just an alert. A hard cap.

Which cloud service does this?

Re: Serverless Horrors

#379

Post by exe34 »

bee_rider wrote: post #314
exe34 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But, I don’t think the idea of just stopping charging works. I'm sorry but this is complete bullshit. they can set a default limit of 1 trillion dollars and give us the option to drop it to $5. there's a good reason they won't do it, but it's not this bullshit claim that's always bandied about.

How would you resolve the situation where ongoing storage costs cause the limit (whatever it is) to be exceeded?

I wouldn't. I've explained what I want.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#380

Post by airtonix »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #348
rustc wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what if they don't say "no problem"? Like the Netlify case where they at first offered a reduced bill (which was still a lot) before the post got viral and the CEO stepped in.

Then don’t use a service that has a reputation for poor customer service? Like they use to say about IBM… “No one ever got fired for choosing AWS (or Azure)”

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