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A $1k AWS mistake

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Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#51

Post by torginus »

> I've been using AWS since around 2007. Back then, EC2 storage was entirely ephemeral and stopping an instance meant losing all your data. The platform has come a long way since then.

Personally I miss ephemeral storage - having the knowledge that if you start the server from a known good state, going back to that state is just a reboot away. Way back when I was in college, a lot of out big-box servers worked like this.

You can replicate this on AWS with snapshots or formatting the EBS volume into 2 partitions and just clearing the ephemeral part on reboot, but I've found it surprisingly hard to get it working with OverlayFS

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#52

Post by wiether »

tecleandor wrote: post #18
nrhrjrjrjtntbt wrote: post #5

NAT gateway probably cheap as fuck for Bezos & co to run but nice little earner. The parking meter or exit ramp toll of cloud infra. Cheap beers in our bar but $1000 curb usage fee to pull up in your uber.

I think it's been calculated that data transfer is the biggest margin product in all AWS catalog by a huge difference. A 2021 calculation done by Cloudflare [0] estimated almost 8000% price markup in EU and US regions. And I can see how, in very big accounts, small mistakes on your data source when you're doing data crunching, or wrong routing, can put thousands and thousands of dollars on your bill in less than an h…

> can put thousands and thousands of dollars on your bill in less than an hour

By default a NGW is limited to 5Gbps https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/nat-gateway...

A GB transferred through a NGW is billed 0.05 USD

So, at continuous max transfer speed, it would take almost 9 hours to reach $1000

Assuming a setup in multi-AZ with three AZs, it's still 3 hours if you have messed so much that you can manage to max your three NGWs

I get your point but the scale is a bit more nuanced than "thousands and thousands of dollars on your bill in less than an hour"

The default limitations won't allow this.

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#54

Post by pjc50 »

merpkz wrote: post #12

> AWS charges $0.09 per GB for data transfer out to the internet from most regions, which adds up fast when you're moving terabytes of data. How does this actually work? So you upload your data to AWS S3 and then if you wish to get it back, you pay per GB of what you stored there?

Nine cents per gigabyte feels like cellphone-plan level ripoff rather than a normal amount for an internet service.

And people wonder why Cloudflare is so popular, when a random DDoS can decide to start inflicting costs like that on you.

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#55

Post by sofixa »

Havoc wrote: post #37

These sort of things show up about once a day between the three big cloud subreddit. Often with larger amounts And it’s always the same - clouds refuse to provide anything more than alerts (that are delayed) and your only option is prayer and begging for mercy. Followed by people claiming with absolute certainty that it’s literally technically impossible to provide hard capped accounts to tinkerers despite there bein…

It's not that it's technically impossible. The very simple problem is that there is no way of providing hard spend caps without giving you the opportunity to bring down your whole production environment when the cap is met. No cloud provides wants to give their customers that much rope to hang themselves with. You just know too many customers will do it wrong or will forget to update the cap or will not coordinate internally, and things will stop working and take forever to fix.

It's easier to waive cost overages than deal with any of that.

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#57

Post by andrewstuart »

wiether wrote: post #53
andrewstuart wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of what?

> faster cheaper less complex more reliable options

Allow me to google that for you…..

https://www.ionos.com/servers/cloud-vps

$22/month for 18 months with a 3-year term 12 vCores CPU 24 GB RAM 720 GB NVMe

Unlimited 1Gbps traffic

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#58

Post by Dunedan »

rwmj wrote: post #45
Dunedan wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on various factors and of course the amount of money in question. I've had AWS approve a refund for a rather large sum a few years ago, but that took quite a bit of back and forth with them. Crucial for the approval was that we had cost alerts already enabled before it happened and were able to show that this didn't help at all, because they triggered way too late. We also had to explain in detail what measur…

Wait, what measures you implemented ? How about AWS implements a hard cap, like everyone has been asking for forever?

The measures were related to the specific cause of the unintended charges, not to never incur any unintended charges again. I agree AWS needs to provide better tooling to enable its customers to avoid such situations.

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#59

Post by wiether »

andrewstuart wrote: post #57
wiether wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> faster cheaper less complex more reliable options

Allow me to google that for you….. https://www.ionos.com/servers/cloud-vps $22/month for 18 months with a 3-year term 12 vCores CPU 24 GB RAM 720 GB NVMe Unlimited 1Gbps traffic

AWS is not just EC2

And even EC2 is not just a VPS

If you need a simple VPS, yes, by all means, don't use AWS.

For this usecase AWS is definitely not cheaper nor simpler. Nobody said that. Ever.

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#60

Post by viraptor »

wiether wrote: post #41
viraptor wrote: post #11

The service gateways are such a weird thing in AWS. There seems to be no reason not to use them and it's like they only exist as a trap for the unaware.

Reading all the posts about people who got bitten by some policies on AWS, I think they should create two modes: - raw - click-ops Because, when you build your infra from scratch on AWS, you absolutely don't want the service gateways to exist by default. You want to have full control on everything, and that's how it works now. You don't want AWS to insert routes in your route tables on your behalf. Or worse, having h…

> you absolutely don't want the service gateways to exist by default.

Why? My work life is in terraform and cloudformation and I can't think of a reason you wouldn't want to have those by default. I mean I can come up with some crazy excuses, but not any realistic scenario. Have you got any? (I'm assuming here that they'd make the performance impact ~0 for the vpc setup since everyone would depend on it)

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