391–400 of 503 posts
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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?
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…
This is an example of why cloud hosting is so scary. Yes, Amazon, and I assume Azure and Google's cloud and others, "usually" refund the money. But I don't want to be forced into bankruptcy because my five visitor a week demo project suddenly becomes the target of a DDOS for no reason at all and the hosting company decides this isn't a "usually" so please send the wire transfer.
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Bit of a nit pick but this is a pet peeve of mine. Creating a new word for a more specific category is never Orwellian. The project in 1984 was to create a language which was less expressive. They were destroying words describing fine distinctions and replacing them with words that elided those distinctions. Creating a new word to highlight a distinction is the opposite. There's definitely criticisms to be made of th…
Yea, I agree after more thought. I think the key is what you said; the term is useful for dividing within a specific domain. People outside that domain see the word and think "those guys are calling this Category-A thing "not-category-A", that makes no sense! Inside the Category A world, there is much more nuance.
The real serverless horror isn't the occasional mistake that leads to a single huge bill, it's the monthly creep. It's so easy to spin up a resource and leave it running. It's just a few bucks, right? I worked for a small venture-funded "cloud-first" company and our AWS bill was a sawtooth waveform. Every month the bill would creep up by a thousand bucks or so, until it hit $20k at which point the COO would notice an…
Sounds like your organization isn’t learning from these periods of high bill. What lead to the bill creeping up, and what mechanisms could be put in place to prevent them in the first place?
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You're missing the unit, it's $0.085 per GB, not TB, and that's only for NA/EU traffic. I rounded up a bit from that number because other regions cost more, plus you get billed a flat amount for each request as well. They do offer progressively cheaper rates as you use more bandwidth each month, but that doesn't have much impact until you're already spending eye watering amounts of money.
Oh, yeah, egg on my face. They only put the unit of measurement at the top, and then talk about TB, so it's a bit deceptive. In retrospect, I was stupid to imagine 0.085/TB made any sense.
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> But, I don’t think the idea of just stopping charging works. You don't stop CHARGING. You stop providing the service that is accumulating charges in excess of what limit I set. And you give some short period of time to settle the bill, modify the service, etc. You can keep charging me, but provide a way to stop the unlimited accrual of charges beyond limits I want to set. > No, I think cloud billing is just inheren…
So, are you looking for some “rate of charges” cap? Like, allow the charges to accumulate indefinitely, but keep track of how much $/sec is being accumulated, and don’t start up new services if it would cause the rate of charges to pass that threshold? Might work. I do think that part of the appeal of these types of services is that you might briefly want to have a very high $/sec. But the idea makes sense, at least.
Compute and API access to storage is usually the thing that bites people with cloud costs.
I want an option that says if I go over $20 on my lambda costs for lambda X, shut it off. If I go over $10 on s3 reads, shut it off.
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Many of the stories on the site are from people who have billing alerts. If you have bot spam, how do you actually think their billing alerts work? The alert is updated every 100ms and shuts off your server immediately? That isn't how billing alerts can or should work.
Yes, actually, if continuing to run the service is going to exceed my available budget then I do want the service turned off! If I can't pay for it, and I know I can't pay for it, what other possible choice do I have? Do any of you people have budgets, or do you all rely on the unending flow of VC money?
The majority of these massive bills are due to traffic, there is pretty much no way that AWS could stop your server in time...if they had the choice, which they don't.
I think my original point was unclear: I am pointing out that if you just think about how this stuff can possibly work, billing alerts can not work in the way you expect. The alert is updated async, the horse has bolted and you are trying to shut the gate.
I don't use AWS for personal stuff because I know their billing alerts won't stop me spending a lot. Don't use them if that is a concern.
I do use AWS at work, we are a relatively big customer and it is still very expensive for what it is. The actual hardware is wildly overpriced, their services aren't particularly scalable (for us), and you are basically paying all that overage for network...which isn't completely faultless either. Imo, using them in a personal capacity is a poor idea.