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A $1k AWS mistake

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Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#81

Post by pyrale »

Dunedan wrote: post #29
CjHuber wrote: post #7

Does Amazon refund you for mistakes, or do you have to land on HN frontpage for that to happen?

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…

Nothing says market power like being able to demand that your paying customers provide proof that they have solutions for the shortcomings of your platform.

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#82

Post by School-Cotton »

maccard wrote: post #71
rwmj wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What does a hard cap look like for EBS volumes? Or S3? RDS? Do you just delete when the limit is hit?

Yes, delete things in reverse order of their creation time until the cap is satisfied (the cap should be a rate, not a total)

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#83

Post by ndriscoll »

sofixa wrote: post #55
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 in…

Why does this always get asserted? It's trivial to do (reserve the cost when you allocate a resource [0]), and takes 2 minutes of thinking about the problem to see an answer if you're actually trying to find one instead of trying to find why you can't.

Data transfer can be pulled into the same model by having an alternate internet gateway model where you pay for some amount of unmetered bandwidth instead of per byte transfer, as other providers already do.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45880863

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#84

Post by [deleted] »

sixtyj wrote: post #64
rikafurude21 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats a year salary but hey think about how much more complicated your work would be if you had to learn to self-host your infra!

Text je srozumitelný, ale angličtina je neuhlazená. Funkční verze: Cloud cult was successfully promoted by all major players, and people have completely forgotten about the possibilities of traditional hosting. But when I see a setup form for an AWS service or the never-ending list of AWS offerings, I get stuck almost immediately.

[deleted]

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#85

Post by mr_toad »

andrewstuart wrote: post #61
wiether wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They’re Linux computers. Anything AWS does you can run on Linux computers. It’s naive to think that AWS is some sort of magically special system that transcends other networked computers, out of brand loyalty. That’s the AWS kool aid that makes otherwise clever people think there’s no way any organization can run their own computer systems - only AWS has the skills for that.

In theory. Good luck rolling your own version of S3.

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#86

Post by thefreeman »

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?

You put a CDN in front of it and heavily cache when serving to external customers

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#87

Post by antonvs »

rikafurude21 wrote: post #27
dabiged wrote: post #13

I made the same mistake and blew $60k. I have never understood why the S3 endpoint isn't deployed by default, except to catch people making this exact mistake.

Thats a year salary but hey think about how much more complicated your work would be if you had to learn to self-host your infra!

This is a non sequitur. I know how to self host my infra, but I’ve been using cloud services for the last 15 years because it means I don’t have to deal with self hosting my infra. It runs completely by itself (mostly managed services, including k8s) and the only time I need to deal with it is when I want to change something.

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#88

Post by [deleted] »

strogonoff wrote: post #75
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…

I think it’s disingenuous to claim that AWS only offers delayed alerts and half-decent cost controls. Granted, these features were not there in the beginning, but for years now AWS, in addition to the better known stuff like strategic limits on auto scaling, allows subscribing to price threshold triggers via SNS and perform automatic actions, which could be anything including scaling down or stopping services complet…

[deleted]

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#89

Post by chrisweekly »

blitzar wrote: post #33
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?

Made in California. We are programmed to receive. You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave

(reference to lyrics from the song "Hotel California", if anyone missed it)

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#90

Post by nine_k »

stef25 wrote: post #47

Made a similar mistake like this once. While just playing around to see what's possible I upload some data to the AWS algo that will recommended products to your users based on everyone's previous purchases. I uploaded a small xls with uid and prodid columns and then kind of forgot about it. A few months later I get a note from bank saying your account is overdrawn. The account is only used for freelancing work which…

I worked in a billing department, and learned to be healthily paranoid about such things. I want to regularly check what I'm billed for. I of course check all my bank accounts' balances at least once a day. All billing emails are marked important in my inbox, and I actually open them.

And of course I give every online service a separate virtual credit card (via privacy dot com, but your bank may issue them directly) with a spend limit set pretty close to the expected usage.

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