This is really nice. Now just add that when the amount is met, everything stops. Or maybe dropped into glacier to accrue charges.
I’d like this to work like a prepaid phone.
AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance
81–90 of 184 posts
Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance
#82What's the point, if there isn't a discount for paying upfront? Will some people/businesses prefer this because it's not 'credit'—does AWS scrobble to your Credit Report in any country? I am failing to see the appeal here...
I work at AWS, but I wasn't involved in this feature, so this isn't anything more than speculation on my part. I've certainly talked to customers who would time their reserved instances and savings plan purchases based on the USD exchange rate for their local currency. This could make sense for those customers too, who often don't have USD denominated bank accounts.
Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance
#83Earlier 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…
With one giant caveat imho — I have a root account, an admin account, a common account (load balancer, database) and then customer-specific accounts. Was working great, using Terraform for consistency, sharing VPC where made sense, etc… until I had an issue and realized that my paid support plan only covered the root account. From what I understand you have to get a separate support plan, with a paid minimum ($100 per for business plan), for each account if you’re gonna need tech support, and you can’t pool until you’re in the $15K+ monthly spend: “AWS Support fees are calculated on a per-account basis for Business and Developer Support plans. For Enterprise Support, you are billed based on the aggregate monthly AWS charges for all your account IDs subscribed to Enterprise Support.”
Really soured me on the setup, tbh.
Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
It may be a 'must' for security but from a UX perspective it is a horrible experience. Does it make sense for one team to have 10+ AWS accounts per service because 'security'? How about if each team out of 1000s in your company has 10 AWS accounts per service? We run our service in 3 geographic regions and have a separate AWS account for each region and stage despite each account supporting resources in multiple regi…
I was so happy when I finally got cross-account roles working so I could use a nice drop down and seamlessly switch between my accounts. So cool!
Then I learned because they’re saving it all browser-side I had to rebuild the whole menu whenever I first used a new browser or computer? Whaaaat? Of all people, AWS console users have to be highly likely to be using multiple devices/browsers. Having to recreate your own prefs at each new environment is nuts.
Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance
#85Wasn't this already a negotiable option?
Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance
#86I was thinking about switching from Digital Ocean+Cloud66 to AWS but all comments about invoices and saas helping forecast aws invoice they convinced me to stay with Digital Ocean
Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance
#87What's the point, if there isn't a discount for paying upfront? Will some people/businesses prefer this because it's not 'credit'—does AWS scrobble to your Credit Report in any country? I am failing to see the appeal here...
> What's the point, if there isn't a discount for paying upfront?
In a past life, I did some work with government clients who preferred to be charged up-front in a lump sum, because it was much easier for them to get funding for that than a recurring subscription.
Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance
#88I 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.
Single most obvious customer obsessed (their tenet BTW) feature they could add, but after over a decade of requests, it's seemingly clear they won't. It keeps me from playing with AWS for side projects as well. Their loss.
This is something that everyone seems to ask for (I know I'd love it), but they haven't implemented it. To me that suggests that they _can't_.
My guess is that billing lags enough that they can't stick to a price cap, which means that they either have to guarantee the price cap and swallow the difference, which could be exploited by malicious users to get free compute, or they have to say that there's a delay on it which makes the cap fairly useless.
Some of these services are billed by such small increments I can't even imagine how complex billing for them is in practice. I'd be surprised if bills are eventually consistent within 24 hours.
I wouldn't be surprised if we see an announcement like billing being guaranteed after 1 hour at some point in the not too distant future, but I'd be surprised if we see realtime caps.
Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance
#89Does 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.
You can do this today with the decentralized cloud: https://docs.storj.io/dcs/how-tos/host-a-static-website/host...
what are the odds that that service exists in 5 years? Or 10 years? I'm confident AWS will.
Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Single most obvious customer obsessed (their tenet BTW) feature they could add, but after over a decade of requests, it's seemingly clear they won't. It keeps me from playing with AWS for side projects as well. Their loss.
This is something that everyone seems to ask for (I know I'd love it), but they haven't implemented it. To me that suggests that they _can't_. My guess is that billing lags enough that they can't stick to a price cap, which means that they either have to guarantee the price cap and swallow the difference, which could be exploited by malicious users to get free compute, or they have to say that there's a delay on it w…
Oddly enough, Budgets seem to work, since I've gotten alerted to runaway services fast enough (I set it at 80% of my previously-free monthly AWS credits) to be able to log in and fix them, or shut them down.