No mention of discounts, so this is probably a purely cashflow / tax management system.
AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance
41–50 of 184 posts
Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
It does change the dynamic / comfort though. Would you rather ask AWS to please revert $5k they put on your card, or talk with them about $5k they'd like to charge you but can't?
It doesn't change the dynamic though. At their revenue, don't care about 5K charge, they can send to collections / sell to 3rd party collections agencies. They do care about keeping you happy as a customer since your employers will be swayed by their employees. So the former is much more likely to succeed, the latter will just make you look like a scammer. At larger sums - they will do much more rigorous checks to av…
It doesn't change the dynamic for AWS. It doesn't change for many of us. But it does for example for a student who forgot to terminate a stack and suddenly can't afford rent/utilities/shopping until the charge is resolved. These are amounts which can really mess up people's lives for weeks.
Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm terrified of the literally infinite bill that might show up from a typo a month down the line Whilst this might sound funny, we were surprised to see it as a common use-cases with users putting https://github.com/infracost/infracost in their CI/CD pipelines to act as safety net. Currently it only works for Terraform users, but we plan to add other infra-as-code tools in the future. We're also discussing how we…
I think most of the cost for medium-large sized business are elastic(number of pods, bandwidth cost depends on requests per second, storage cost for many things increases linearly with users etc).
Yep - it seems to depend on the architecture too (e.g. companies that lift-and-shift to the cloud use VMs heavily). We're discussing ideas on https://github.com/infracost/infracost/issues/730, e.g. could CloudWatch be used to fetch the usage so user has context of what those elastic services used last week/month.
Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance
#44Is this for Tax benefits? Where you could put in all your annual net profits for AWS credit?
Not sure about those but it'll be incredibly useful for research grant funding monies. Most research grants are "use it or lose it" so if you have any essential infrastructure, capital with short shelf lives/frequent replacement needs, etc. you want/need after the end of the grant, you pay for it in advance.
A group I worked with bought about 5 years worth of a specific consumable they needed to continue working, 2-3 year service contract with a vendor to maintain aspects of things so some work could continue and be leveraged for future grants, and hosting/software licenses were often purchased for long time horizons in advance, where possible.
With use it or lose it money, you use it. Whether money should be provisioned that way and coming in under budget should be punished is another story...
Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance
#45Does this mean I can set up a static website on S3, pre-pay fir the next hundred years of hosting costs and then pretty much forget about it? Because I would genuinely love to be able to do that.
You can do this today with the decentralized cloud: https://docs.storj.io/dcs/how-tos/host-a-static-website/host...
Of course it has its own cryptocurrency.
Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance
#46Does this mean I can set up a static website on S3, pre-pay fir the next hundred years of hosting costs and then pretty much forget about it? Because I would genuinely love to be able to do that.
I've also been thinking about that! I wonder if https://archive.org/web/ is an alternative though, as in could I pay them so they could mirror it for a 100 years?
Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance
#47I really wish you could just designate a group of resources as unimportant, set a billing limit, and let Amazon nuke everything / delete your files / whatever, if you go over the limit. Everytime I try to learn cloud infrastructure stuff I'm terrified of the literally infinite bill that might show up from a typo a month down the line.
If this is an issue, use Lightsail or a tier 2 provider (like DigitalOcean)
Then you aren't learning AWS, which was the stated goal.
Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance
#48I really wish you could just designate a group of resources as unimportant, set a billing limit, and let Amazon nuke everything / delete your files / whatever, if you go over the limit. Everytime I try to learn cloud infrastructure stuff I'm terrified of the literally infinite bill that might show up from a typo a month down the line.
If not possible to cap price, starting with the capacity limiter on S3 and bandwidth limit at VPC level would do. The possibility that someone flood the server even for static resources causing bandwidth spiked Bill is scary.
That threat even has its own name now: a denial-of-wallet attack.
The limited protections available against this threat from the big cloud providers have to be seen as a warning sign. It's only a matter of time before any small business using these services for hosting can be subject to sudden shakedowns by criminals. "Nice business-critical infrastructure you have there, be a shame if anything were to happen to it." Some of the providers do offer a DoS mitigation service, but the cost for the higher levels can start to look like a shakedown itself.
Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance
#49I really wish you could just designate a group of resources as unimportant, set a billing limit, and let Amazon nuke everything / delete your files / whatever, if you go over the limit. Everytime I try to learn cloud infrastructure stuff I'm terrified of the literally infinite bill that might show up from a typo a month down the line.
I think GCP's official method for doing this is pretty similar to what you describe. You basically create a cloud function that disables billing if your bill goes over a configured limit. It's not perfect, because there's a tiny bit of lag between usage and billing calculation, but you'll only end up with a few dollars over the limit instead of thousands. Truly the nuclear option though.
Oh, on the GCP story I was always reminded of this:
Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance
#50What's the point, if there isn't a discount for paying upfront? Will some people/businesses prefer this because it's not 'credit'—does AWS scrobble to your Credit Report in any country? I am failing to see the appeal here...
For companies operating on a cash basis with a standard Jan-Dec fiscal calendar (e.g. most small businesses), this would allow you to deduct future spending by prepurchasing AWS credits. It locks away whatever money you dedicate to it but that’d be peanuts compared to paying income tax on it in order to carry it forward as retained earnings.
Why not use a dedicated escrow service for that, which wouold work with all expenses, not just AWS?