Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance
61–70 of 184 posts
Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance
#62Does 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
#63Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance
#64Is 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…
Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance
#65AWS 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…
We were a bit shocked to see this happen and it was a very subtle increase that was sort of hidden in Cost Explorer unless you spent hours digging into it and comparing your past invoices.
(I'm a co-founder of CloudForecast)
Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance
#66I 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.
Then last month I got an email saying "Hey, those quotas you were setting using the API documented to set quotas, those were actually not being enforced the whole time because of undocumented issues with our systems." So basically you can't rely on the documented behavior of these systems, there's no good way to test whether your code is correct or whether your limits will work without actually exceeding your budget for real, and the whole thing is a clusterfuck. When you get a surprise bill you just have to throw yourself at the mercy of whichever first line billing support rep is randomly assigned to your case.
Limiting your bill to something less than "potentially infinite" is just a basic fundamental feature that shouldn't require rolling your own bill-monitoring service relying on poorly documented and malfunctioning APIs with no provision for testing. There's no excuse strong enough to explain why the cloud providers can't do something reasonable here.
Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've read that some people use a pre-paid credit card with a $1 spending limit when setting up their playground accounts. Seems like a reasonable approach.
You will still owe the incurred charges and AWS can send it to collections.
They nerfed the $100 of AWS credits for Alexa developers with zero notice this month, which caused me to incur overages this and last month.
I've gotten last month's bill waived, but still received a passive-aggressive email with bad English by a Territory Account Sales person from my region about how my account could be suspended, if I didn't reply to the email within the day. I'm not sure I would trust said person to handle my accounts, even if I was on a corporate budget.
I'm still in the process of moving most of my workload away from AWS.
Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance
#68Earlier 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.
> 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.
Is this like asking the phone company "When I reach my plan limits, stop charging me money but let me keep making calls?"
Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance
#69Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance
#70Earlier 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…
> 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…