Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt • Hacker News Board

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#71

Post by joncalhoun » Wed, May 05, 2021, 1:29 AM UTC

eric4smith wrote: post #20

harry8 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>DigitalOcean is the worst with the dormant accounts. Just got dinged around $2.40 on my credit card. Going into DO I could not find what was causing that charge. There was nothing there. Wuuuttttt. Wuuuttt? Fraud is what.

I would not go that far to say it's fraud. Calm down. Maybe it's something I missed. Maybe its some hidden feature that I did not turn off. But I deleted all my droplets, all my IP's all my firewalls, etc, etc and could not find anything else.

I'd double check that you don't have multiple orgs. You used to share a cess to your account with people, then they made some org change a while back that essentially moved that shared access setup to an org and gave you a new personal account iirc. Easy to not realize you have both.

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#72

Post by ghaff » Wed, May 05, 2021, 1:29 AM UTC

cesarb wrote: post #65

snorkel wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A spending kill switch can be setup on AWS using AWS Budgets alerts and Lambda but it’s a DIY project, not a built-in feature.

The whole point of a "spending kill switch" is as a backstop when you make a mistake; but if you do it as a "DIY project", what prevents you from making a mistake on it? It has to be a built-in feature.

So what services do you kill? Everything? Including databases and S3?

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#73

Post by coderintherye » Wed, May 05, 2021, 1:33 AM UTC

maxgashkov wrote: post #60

HomeDeLaPot wrote: post #19

Is there seriously no way in AWS/Azure/GCP to specify "Here's my budget, shut everything down if I exceed $X"? I don't use those platforms much but was always surprised I couldn't find anything like that right off the bat. I'll build cloud stuff if it makes sense at work, but if I'm footing the bill I'll stick to something that can provide an actual upper limit.

That’s extremely hard to design, at least with the current state of what AWS bills and does not bill. Example: let’s assume you’ve set the cut-off budget too strict, spun off another shard for your stateful service (DB for example), it received and stored some data during the short window before some other service brought whole account over budget (i.e. paid egress crossed the threshold). To bring VM and EBS charges…

A complicated solution is not what people are really asking for though.

What I and I expect most people want is a cap which then spins down services when they reach that cap. Nobody is going to care if the cap is set to $1000 and the final bill is $1,020. The problem being solved for is not wanting to have to ever worry about missing an alert and waking up to a bill that is a factor or two beyond expectations. I can afford my bill being 10% or even 40% above my expectation. I can't afford my bill being 500% off.

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#74

Post by paaakthecaaa » Wed, May 05, 2021, 1:33 AM UTC

artichokeheart wrote: post #24

AWS employs cost obfuscation by design otherwise the default view when you open the console would show you all of your current active services. Not only is that not the case, a single screen to show you all of your current active services doesn't exist. You need to take a deep dive into cost explorer (assuming you have access in corporate land) and try to decipher in what that all means.

They definitely need a senior executive to stand up and say, "The Customer wants us to be transparent in billing, fix that now."

Then they need to start a team dedicated to finding a good way to let customers halt spending at a given limit with minimal impact on their operations.

They already win on UX (okay, okay, it's an opinion ffs), but unlimited liability makes a lot of people very uncomfortable. Those two actions would go a long ways towards demonstrating good faith in that area.

If it would cost too much, maybe they could present it as an easy way to cut expenses at the same time that they introduce a small price increase. This is a common and long-standing complaint/feature request.

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#75

Post by Bluecobra » Wed, May 05, 2021, 1:33 AM UTC

tsfranke wrote: post #7

AWS offers throw away accounts during immersion days, jam sessions, etc (especially at re:invent). It would be great if these were extended to the general public, even if at a small fee.

There’s a service like this called Qwicklabs that I have been using for GCP training. You load a time limited lab and get a new set of credentials only for that session. After the timer is up, poof everything is deleted.

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#76

Post by PeterisP » Wed, May 05, 2021, 1:36 AM UTC

throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #16

Oh come on. We all know that the 'accidental revenue' from the way Free Tier is set up probably makes up a cool 2 million or more annually. Plenty to justify its continued abuse of naive students. Why would they walk away from that cash? The only people they're pissing off is people who aren't using AWS anyway.

AWS annual revenue is $50+ billion. (https://www.zdnet.com/article/aws-run-rate-hits-54-billion-a...)

Anything that they can get from "naive students" and developers who don't notice small recurring charges is so utterly insignificant that it can't justify any decision whatsoever. If the public relations aspects of it cause even a 0.01% change in AWS growth, that's already $5 million of lost revenue; if you can assure developers worldwide that it's not so risky to try and adopt AWS a bit more and get a 1% extra growth, that would be worth $500 million and justify walking away from all kinds of irrelevantly small cash flows.

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#77

Post by minxomat » Wed, May 05, 2021, 1:38 AM UTC

indemnity wrote: post #43

artichokeheart wrote: post #24

AWS employs cost obfuscation by design otherwise the default view when you open the console would show you all of your current active services. Not only is that not the case, a single screen to show you all of your current active services doesn't exist. You need to take a deep dive into cost explorer (assuming you have access in corporate land) and try to decipher in what that all means.

Azure does this a little better, but best would be to see a breakdown on the invoice with links directly back to the resource. Maybe there are discounts or other processing that makes this hard. Or, less charitably, this would lead to people optimising their costs a lot better and canceling unused services much sooner.

Enterprise Agreement accounts aren’t billed on demand, so there’s little use for that in accounts spending a lot of money.

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#78

Post by ficklepickle » Wed, May 05, 2021, 1:38 AM UTC

kossTKR wrote: post #55

Lots of companies also gets hacked each month for thousands of dollars because some key to S3 with too many privileges gets leaked. The entire system is completely sinister. The fact that keys pertaining to S3 has anything do with being able to start hundreds of VM's in different parts of the AWS system or do whatever is bad. I've seen companies be ruined by this, and it's in no way obvious how stupid their system is…

> You have to read huge manuals to know how to "only give access to s3" through a key

I have to disagree with this. It really is pretty straight forward.[0]

[0] - https://objectivefs.com/howto/how-to-restrict-s3-bucket-poli...

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#79

Post by simonw » Wed, May 05, 2021, 1:39 AM UTC

kossTKR wrote: post #55

Lots of companies also gets hacked each month for thousands of dollars because some key to S3 with too many privileges gets leaked. The entire system is completely sinister. The fact that keys pertaining to S3 has anything do with being able to start hundreds of VM's in different parts of the AWS system or do whatever is bad. I've seen companies be ruined by this, and it's in no way obvious how stupid their system is…

The feature I most want from AWS is a simple way to create credentials that are only allowed to read from or write to a specific S3 bucket.

The way you do this at the moment genuinely involves copying and pasting JSON policy documents around! It's horrific.

I want this for myself, but more importantly I want it for users of software that I write. I would love to be able to build something that stores a user's data in an S3 bucket that they own (and are billed for directly) - but it's currently just too difficult to talk them through setting up the bucket and creating the right credentials for it.

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#80

Post by ineedasername » Wed, May 05, 2021, 1:40 AM UTC

I don't understand why there isn't at least a setting that says "turn everything off if I hit $x."

Then just given people a certain grace period to reactivate or get their data out before it's removed.

It wouldn't fix production deployments where you want alarms, not a shutdown, when you hit spending caps, but it would help people on the dev stage to avoid issues like this.