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AWS free tier data transfer expansion

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Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#81
post #15

The egregious AWS egress fees have made AWS practically useless for all but enterprise customers. Who would pay 100$ for backup test or recovery with S3?

Literally any tech company paying US engineering salaries? Try to calculate what a bay area engineer makes hourly sometimes, then go ahead and flip that AWS cross-region data replication checkbox (and maybe make your S3 bucket immutable too, storage is cheap), then tell your boss that you just saved the company a whole bunch of money compared to your team cobbling together some janky bespoke backup solution that nobody will remember how or if it works 12 months from now.

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#83

So which cloud provider offers a HARD spend limit? I just want to fund my account e.g. $20/month and never, ever, spend a cent over that. Even if my account gets hacked for bitcoin mining or whatever, I don't want to spend a cent over that. With AWS, you can do it, via a trigger on a spend notification and a script, but the whole thing is a giant kludge. It should be a default feature. It should be a default feature…

Edit: On second thought this is probably a bad idea, but I'm leaving my original comment below for posterity. Probably easiest to generate a virtual card number with a spend limit, off the top of my head I know Capital One offers this, Apple will also generate virtual card numbers though I don't know if you can set a spend limit on them.

This just stops them from easily charging you. It doesn't change your liability.

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#84
post #17

Was only a matter of time after their egregious egress fees were exposed, 2 Cloudflare posts that help make this happen: https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress/ https://www.cloudflare.com/press-releases/2021/cloudflare-an...

I've seen Cloudflare Enterprise accounts for two clients, the current one is paying the equivalent of $0.035/GB, the other was substantially higher although I've forgotten the numbers. Equivalent pricing from another vendor for the same service with enterprise support was $0.0021/GB. Their free bandwidth promises are grossly overstated, and possibly even a marketing fabrication, given previous reports here and elsewh…

$0.035/GB sounds about an order of magnitude too high once you get to a large scale, were these clients doing small amounts of bandwidth?

On the other hand, $0.0021/GB is far on the cheaper end of the spectrum, who is it that offers something that low?

Agreed all around that the pricing is frustratingly opaque.

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#85
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edit: On second thought this is probably a bad idea, but I'm leaving my original comment below for posterity. Probably easiest to generate a virtual card number with a spend limit, off the top of my head I know Capital One offers this, Apple will also generate virtual card numbers though I don't know if you can set a spend limit on them.

This just stops them from easily charging you. It doesn't change your liability.

Yeah good point, I was thinking they'd cut your service off but on second thought that's probably not the case.

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#86

So which cloud provider offers a HARD spend limit? I just want to fund my account e.g. $20/month and never, ever, spend a cent over that. Even if my account gets hacked for bitcoin mining or whatever, I don't want to spend a cent over that. With AWS, you can do it, via a trigger on a spend notification and a script, but the whole thing is a giant kludge. It should be a default feature. It should be a default feature…

I think the closest you can get is using a VPS like DigitalOcean where you pay $X for a server and there's no autoscaling to worry about. But even with those, if you go over the bandwidth limit (although with DO the bandwidth limit is a lot higher) you would be charged more. The unfortunate reality is that hobby developers that just want to pay $20/month aren't the target audience for GCP etc. They don't really care…

> and those large enterprises would have very little use for something like "cap my spend at $20".

For the enterprise as a whole, probably not. But it would still be useful to be able to create sandbox accounts for experimentation with a hard limit on spend. Or give developers their own cloud accounts to run development and testing infrastructure that they can control, without having to worry about them accidentally spending way too much.

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#87
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use Budgets Actions for that: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws-cloud-financial-management/...

Note that these are not instantaneous. You can still incur charges before the budget action kicks in and terminates your resources.

Ok so how would this work in any other way?

Should _every_ S3 action have a `if will_incur_charges() and should_not_incur_charges(): raise Exception()` statement in it's critical path? No, of course not. Everyone get's slower for nobodies benefit. It has to be delayed.

But then you run into an issue: what if you end up costing AWS 100$ before the budget action kicks in. Should you not pay that? Why not?

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#88
post #39

AWS free tier is horrible. You have to enter a creditcard to sign up, and then there is no way to prevent it being charged when you go over the limit for some reason. If you get on the frontpage of HN for example, you might be majorly screwed. It's a test account, I just want it to shut down when the limit is reached.

It has been a while since I messed with the AWS panel, but IIRC you can set budget alerts so you’re notified once a threshold is crossed. It’s not a perfect solution, but if you expect to spend $0 then an alert on $0.01 is pretty trivial to set up and goes a long way to prevent end of the month surprises.

And if you get in a car accident and don't check your email for a few days? It's extremely hard to understand how a company with their resources is able to send a notification but not able to shut it off if that's what the customer wants.

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#89

AWS free tier is horrible. You have to enter a creditcard to sign up, and then there is no way to prevent it being charged when you go over the limit for some reason. If you get on the frontpage of HN for example, you might be majorly screwed. It's a test account, I just want it to shut down when the limit is reached.

i don't think you'll find much sympathy for the free thing not being good enough

it's pretty reasonable for them to ask for a CC -- making it too easy to get free compute/bandwidth is opening the door wide for abuse.

..but yeah, everyone wishes they'd have a sane way to halt services if over budget.

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