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Serverless Horrors

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Re: Serverless Horrors

#91

Post by qcnguy »

JJMcJ wrote: post #88
EGreg wrote: post #28

Are there any protections these days at the cloud provider level? Like setting a maximum budget for a certain service (EC2, Aurora?) because downtime is preferable to this?

That's why I like VPS setups. You hit the monthly maximum, and it just stops working. I host demos, not running a business, so it's less of an issue to get interrupted. Better an interruption than a $50,000 bill for forgetting to shut off a test database from last Wednesday.

That's not comparable. With a VPS there is no monthly maximum, just a max load on a second by second basis. You can be hit with traffic of which 90% bounces because your server is down, get nowhere near your intended monthly maximum, and then the rest of the month is quiet.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#92

Post by skippyboxedhero »

game_the0ry wrote: post #76

I have a feeling I will be downvoted for this, but... Have the people posting these horror stories never heard of billing alerts?

Many of the stories on the site are from people who have billing alerts.

If you have bot spam, how do you actually think their billing alerts work? The alert is updated every 100ms and shuts off your server immediately? That isn't how billing alerts can or should work.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#93

Post by JackSlateur »

JJMcJ wrote: post #83
phoenixhaber wrote: post #43

When I was learning to program through a bootcamp I spun up an elastic beanstalk instance that was free but required a credit card to prove your identity. No problem that makes sense - it's an easy way to prove authentication as a bot can't spam a credit card (or else it would be financial fraud and most likely a felony). Amazon then charged me one hundred thousand dollars as the server was hit by bot spam. I had the…

This is an example of why cloud hosting is so scary. Yes, Amazon, and I assume Azure and Google's cloud and others, "usually" refund the money. But I don't want to be forced into bankruptcy because my five visitor a week demo project suddenly becomes the target of a DDOS for no reason at all and the hosting company decides this isn't a "usually" so please send the wire transfer.

They have billing limits

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cost-management/latest/userguide...

Re: Serverless Horrors

#94

Post by cyanydeez »

franktankbank wrote: post #42
pooper wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Seems an interesting oversight. I can just imagine the roundtable, uhh guys who do we charge for 403? Who can we charge? But what if people hit random buckets as an attack? Great! It is amazing, isn't it? Something starts as an oversight but by the time it reaches down to customer support, it becomes an edict from above as it is "expected behavior". > AWS was kind enough to cancel my S3 bill. However, they emphasiz…

Even pooper is upset about the stench. Tech is fuckin dumb in the corps, the only logical explanation to me is kickbacks to the CTO or similar.

you don't need kickbacks at this level. They're all judged by their 6-month outlook on revenue and their market shares.

This is just obfuscating grift justified by the "well, you own the severless functions!"

Re: Serverless Horrors

#95

Post by agwa »

JackSlateur wrote: post #93
JJMcJ wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an example of why cloud hosting is so scary. Yes, Amazon, and I assume Azure and Google's cloud and others, "usually" refund the money. But I don't want to be forced into bankruptcy because my five visitor a week demo project suddenly becomes the target of a DDOS for no reason at all and the hosting company decides this isn't a "usually" so please send the wire transfer.

They have billing limits https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cost-management/latest/userguide...

Those are not in fact limits:

> There can be a delay between when you incur a charge and when you receive a notification from AWS Budgets for the charge. This is due to a delay between when an AWS resource is used and when that resource usage is billed. You might incur additional costs or usage that exceed your budget notification threshold before AWS Budgets can notify you, and your actual costs or usage may continue to increase or decrease after you receive the notification.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#96

Post by motorest »

phoenixhaber wrote: post #43

When I was learning to program through a bootcamp I spun up an elastic beanstalk instance that was free but required a credit card to prove your identity. No problem that makes sense - it's an easy way to prove authentication as a bot can't spam a credit card (or else it would be financial fraud and most likely a felony). Amazon then charged me one hundred thousand dollars as the server was hit by bot spam. I had the…

> When I was learning to program through a bootcamp I spun up an elastic beanstalk instance that was free but required a credit card to prove your identity.

Is it just me or is this just a cheap excuse to grab a payment method from unsuspecting free-tier users?

Re: Serverless Horrors

#97

Post by emseetech »

JJMcJ wrote: post #88
EGreg wrote: post #28

Are there any protections these days at the cloud provider level? Like setting a maximum budget for a certain service (EC2, Aurora?) because downtime is preferable to this?

That's why I like VPS setups. You hit the monthly maximum, and it just stops working. I host demos, not running a business, so it's less of an issue to get interrupted. Better an interruption than a $50,000 bill for forgetting to shut off a test database from last Wednesday.

Unless a startup has five+ nines service contracts with their customers already, a little bit of downtime once in a while is not the end of the world the cloud services want us to believe.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#98

Post by cjbgkagh »

1oooqooq wrote: post #81
kleinsch wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Freezing a card doesn’t mean the debt is erased. They can still take you to collections.

"your honor, they provided the credit card to prove their identity for the free plan and now we want to collect 100k"

I’ve not read the fine print but I’d be worried that there would be something in there that allows this.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#99

Post by xhkkffbf »

phoenixhaber wrote: post #43

When I was learning to program through a bootcamp I spun up an elastic beanstalk instance that was free but required a credit card to prove your identity. No problem that makes sense - it's an easy way to prove authentication as a bot can't spam a credit card (or else it would be financial fraud and most likely a felony). Amazon then charged me one hundred thousand dollars as the server was hit by bot spam. I had the…

Something similar happened to me, but not at the outrageous scale. I wanted to try some AI example on Bedrock. So the tutorial said I needed to set up some OpenSearch option. Voila. A few days later I had a bill for $120. The scale is not as horrible, but the principle is the same.

Re: Serverless Horrors

#100

Post by Nextgrid »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #98
1oooqooq wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"your honor, they provided the credit card to prove their identity for the free plan and now we want to collect 100k"

I’ve not read the fine print but I’d be worried that there would be something in there that allows this.

There are light-years between what a company thinks their ToS “allow” and what a court would actually determine is allowed. Plenty of ToS clauses in major contracts are unenforceable by law.

In this situation if it were to actually go to court I’d expect the actual bill to get significantly reduced at the very least. But because it’s a completely bullshit charge based on bandwidth usage (which costs them nothing) it won’t go anywhere near that and will just get written off anyway.

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