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Amazon S3 will no longer charge for several HTTP error codes

aws.amazon.com

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Re: Amazon S3 will no longer charge for several HTTP error codes

#51

Post by _adamb »

lapcat wrote: post #20

AWS is full of dark patterns. You can sign up for the so-called "free" tier and then too easily, unwittingly enable something that suddenly charges you hundreds of dollars before you know it (by getting a bill at the end of the month), even if you're not doing anything with the service except looking around. AWS doesn't give any warning to free tier members that a configuration change is going to cost you, and their…

We have a slack channel, #aws-budget-alerts, where AWS sends a notification any time our forecasted spend reaches certain milestones or the actual spend reaches certain milestones.

It's a really easy to set up app!

Re: Amazon S3 will no longer charge for several HTTP error codes

#53

Post by mike_d »

dmw_ng wrote: post #12

Can't imagine a change like this would be made without some analysis.. would love an internal view into a decision like this, I wonder if they already have log data to compute financial loss from the change, or if they have sampling instrumentation fancy enough to write/deploy custom reports like this quickly. In any case 2 weeks seems like an impressive turnaround for such a large service, unless they'd been interna…

> Can't imagine a change like this would be made without some analysis.. would love an internal view into a decision like this

Sure, here you go: There was some buzz and negative press so it got picked up by the social media managers who forwarded it to executive escalations who loops in legal. Legal realizes that what they are doing is borderline fraud and sends it to the VP that oversees billing as a P0. It then gets handed down to a senior director who is responsible for fixing it within a week. Comms gets looped in to soft announce it.

At no point does anyone look at log data or give a shit about any instrumentation. It is a business decision to limit liability to a lawsuit or BCP investigation. As a publicly traded company it is also extremely risky for them to book revenue that comes from fraudulent billing.

Re: Amazon S3 will no longer charge for several HTTP error codes

#54

Post by paulddraper »

OptionOfT wrote: post #42
ranger_danger wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AWS doesn't give any warning It does if you ask it to. You can get billing alerts if current costs are projected to go over a threshold.

But it's kinda the same as a trial where you have to put in a credit card number. If they auto-charge once the trial is over, I don't like them. That is a dark pattern. Equally, with this, AWS could very well ask you, the user, what you'd like to do if you surpass the free tier. Charge? Or turn it all off. On top of that they could instate default thresholds so that you, the person who just started their free trial,…

Almost all trials tell you how much they'll charge you.

Re: Amazon S3 will no longer charge for several HTTP error codes

#56

Post by sierra1011 »

_adamb wrote: post #51
lapcat wrote: post #20

AWS is full of dark patterns. You can sign up for the so-called "free" tier and then too easily, unwittingly enable something that suddenly charges you hundreds of dollars before you know it (by getting a bill at the end of the month), even if you're not doing anything with the service except looking around. AWS doesn't give any warning to free tier members that a configuration change is going to cost you, and their…

We have a slack channel, #aws-budget-alerts, where AWS sends a notification any time our forecasted spend reaches certain milestones or the actual spend reaches certain milestones. It's a really easy to set up app!

Ooh, that sounds nice. Beats my current slew of emails around week 3 of the month. Got a link to any docs to get set up quickly?

Re: Amazon S3 will no longer charge for several HTTP error codes

#57

Post by xmprt »

mike_d wrote: post #53
dmw_ng wrote: post #12

Can't imagine a change like this would be made without some analysis.. would love an internal view into a decision like this, I wonder if they already have log data to compute financial loss from the change, or if they have sampling instrumentation fancy enough to write/deploy custom reports like this quickly. In any case 2 weeks seems like an impressive turnaround for such a large service, unless they'd been interna…

> Can't imagine a change like this would be made without some analysis.. would love an internal view into a decision like this Sure, here you go: There was some buzz and negative press so it got picked up by the social media managers who forwarded it to executive escalations who loops in legal. Legal realizes that what they are doing is borderline fraud and sends it to the VP that oversees billing as a P0. It then ge…

I find this hard to believe because this issue was known for years.

Re: Amazon S3 will no longer charge for several HTTP error codes

#58

Post by SSLy »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #31
treve wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the same timespan Microsoft released Windows 1 all the way up to XP

Why have things stagnated?

actual innovation has just moved to different problems, now that the desktop OS has been mostly "solved" – until SteamOS showed a fresher way forward, that is.

Re: Amazon S3 will no longer charge for several HTTP error codes

#59

Post by adrianmonk »

hunter2_ wrote: post #24
chadhutchins10 wrote: post #15

We've done it. Now let's re-engineer our apps to use error codes for 200 responses and get free S3 usage.

If I understand TFA, you'd need to find a way to get S3 (which offers no server-side script execution, only basic file delivery) to emit an error code (403 specifically) alongside a response of useful data. Good luck...

It said "never incur request or bandwidth charges". I assume this means you don't pay to compute the response or for the bandwidth to deliver it.

Seems you could compute the response, store it somewhere (memcached or something), and then return an error. Then have the caller make another call to retrieve the response. (To associate the two requests, have the caller generate a UUID and pass it on both calls.)

That doesn't make it entirely free, but it reduces the compute cost of every request to just reading from a cache.

(This does sound like a good way to get banned or something else nasty, so it's definitely not a recommendation.)

Re: Amazon S3 will no longer charge for several HTTP error codes

#60

Post by drekipus »

xmprt wrote: post #57
mike_d wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can't imagine a change like this would be made without some analysis.. would love an internal view into a decision like this Sure, here you go: There was some buzz and negative press so it got picked up by the social media managers who forwarded it to executive escalations who loops in legal. Legal realizes that what they are doing is borderline fraud and sends it to the VP that oversees billing as a P0. It then ge…

I find this hard to believe because this issue was known for years.

It only just became viral in social media.

This is how I found out about it last week: https://youtu.be/OWggTcVgiNg?si=RnxDq1y6-yr_SQ8L

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