AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance • Hacker News Board

Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance

#51

Post by Nextgrid » Wed, Jul 21, 2021, 1:08 PM UTC

ramshanker wrote: post #9

academia_hack wrote: post #4

I 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.

> The possibility that someone flood the server even for static resources causing bandwidth spiked Bill is scary.

Genuinely curious, is this just a side-effect of the cloud craze or did DDoS attacks become so powerful that old-school approaches of appropriately-sized bare-metal infrastructure with finite but unmetered bandwidth are no longer viable?

The way I see it, you can provision enough unmetered bandwidth to cover your typical load + a safety margin at a flat rate per month, and worst case scenario if the attack is big enough you merely get downtime (allowing you to re-evaluate the situation and decide whether to throw more bandwidth at the problem or purchase attack mitigation services) instead of an infinite bill?

My current ISP gives me 1Gbps unmetered. Worst case scenario the connection is saturated but at no point the ISP will come to me and ask for extra money.

Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance

#52

Post by zodiakzz » Wed, Jul 21, 2021, 1:12 PM UTC

I wish Digital Ocean would allow this. My country's debit/credit cards don't work online reliably, my attached cards can start getting rejected randomly any time. I'm always nervous about getting my account suspended due to missed payments, DO is pretty forgiving thankfully.

Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance

#53

Post by StratusBen » Wed, Jul 21, 2021, 1:24 PM UTC

I'm surprised it took this long for AWS to launch something as basic as this. As others in the thread have mentioned, the core problem of tracking your AWS costs and where they're coming from is still a very hard problem for most organizations. Especially startups.

I'm a co-founder of https://www.vantage.sh/ which helps organizations track their AWS costs and we'll look at incorporating Advance Pay balances into the platform.

Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance

#54

Post by YetAnotherNick » Wed, Jul 21, 2021, 1:46 PM UTC

akh wrote: post #43

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Didn't imagined that this functionality would be present. Looks very useful and I would try it out for my terraform setup!

Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance

#55

Post by ZeroCool2u » Wed, Jul 21, 2021, 1:52 PM UTC

outloudvi wrote: post #49

ZeroCool2u wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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: https://blog.tomilkieway.com/72k-1/

Wow, well they had some pretty fundamental design problems that the author points out. Infinite recursion due to back linking is a pretty easy way to max out your bill. I'm glad that Google forgave the bill at least.

Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance

#56

Post by Silhouette » Wed, Jul 21, 2021, 2:04 PM UTC

Nextgrid wrote: post #51

ramshanker wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The possibility that someone flood the server even for static resources causing bandwidth spiked Bill is scary. Genuinely curious, is this just a side-effect of the cloud craze or did DDoS attacks become so powerful that old-school approaches of appropriately-sized bare-metal infrastructure with finite but unmetered bandwidth are no longer viable? The way I see it, you can provision enough unmetered bandwidth to co…

You could still run many systems just fine on private infrastructure with at most a business-class Internet connection to your office or a colo bill for putting your servers somewhere more central. This didn't magically stop working just because someone got paid a lot of money to do PR for cloud services. By the time you take into account the financial costs and inherent risks of cloud hosting, maybe more things should still run that way than actually do.

The practical problem today is that cloud now has so much mindshare, justified or otherwise, that the ecosystem around private hosting is diminished. Finding good people with the required admin skills, good sources of equipment, even good software to run local versions of automation we take for granted in the cloud, can be harder than it used to be.

I won't be surprised if in a few years some huge tech firm we all thought had faded into obscurity enjoys a new lease of life by offering a set of locally hosted equivalents to popular cloud services that are also easy to administer and scale but come with a lot more predictability because they run on the customer's own infrastructure.

Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance

#57

Post by Terretta » Wed, Jul 21, 2021, 2:07 PM UTC

ZeroCool2u wrote: post #22

academia_hack wrote: post #4

I 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.

> GCP's official method for doing this is … a cloud function that disables billing if your bill goes over a configured limit

I’d love it if GCP’s official method were to disable billing if your bill went over a limit.

Sadly, I suspect it would just disable systems instead.

Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance

#58

Post by Terretta » Wed, Jul 21, 2021, 2:11 PM UTC

benjaminwootton wrote: post #37

AWS billing practices are horrible, and they are increasingly more “Oracle” like in their approach. I had a security issue related to a SaaS product which led to a $7k AWS line item when someone started sending a LIST request to S3 buckets billions of times. They would not consider refunding. Now I’m having a bunch of problems terminating some AWS Orgs accounts and they are being deliberately difficult in getting it…

Anecdata, but my experience as CTO of a startup, a hedge fund, and a bank has been the opposite.

I’ve never had an unexpected cost they didn’t readily credit back, provided we were taking the recommended and reasonably easy steps to keep on top of costs and limits.

Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance

#59

Post by tonyedgecombe » Wed, Jul 21, 2021, 2:20 PM UTC

zodiakzz wrote: post #52

I wish Digital Ocean would allow this. My country's debit/credit cards don't work online reliably, my attached cards can start getting rejected randomly any time. I'm always nervous about getting my account suspended due to missed payments, DO is pretty forgiving thankfully.

Linode allows you to pre-fund your account.

Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance

#60

Post by koolba » Wed, Jul 21, 2021, 2:23 PM UTC

akh wrote: post #20

academia_hack wrote: post #4

I 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'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…

> Perhaps having separate AWS accounts ...

You absolutely must, MUST, MUST be using separate AWS accounts for separate purposes. You can have as many as you’d like and roll up the billing into one actual paying account.

This is a win for accountability (roll up dev and easily see the split out for separate environments), but more importantly for security as it limits the blast radius for any one environment. Combined with per-account budget alerts it’s a win across the board.