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A $1k AWS mistake

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Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#91

Post by colechristensen »

Waterluvian wrote: post #76
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…

This might be speaking the obvious, but I think that the lack of half-decent cost controls is not intentionally malicious. There is no mustache-twirling villain who has a great idea on how to !@#$ people out of their money. I think it's the play between incompetence and having absolutely no incentive to do anything about it (which is still a form of malice). I've used AWS for about 10 years and am by no means an expe…

AWS isn't for tinkerers and doesn't have guard rails for them, that's it. Anybody can use it but it's not designed for you to spend $12 per month. They DO have cost anomaly monitoring, they give you data so you can set up your own alerts for usage or data, but it's not a primary feature because they're picking their customers and it isn't the bottom of the market hobbyist. There are plenty of other services looking for that segment.

I have budgets set up and alerts through a separate alerting service that pings me if my estimates go above what I've set for a month. But it wouldn't fix a short term mistake; I don't need it to.

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#92

Post by lysace »

Waterluvian wrote: post #76
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…

This might be speaking the obvious, but I think that the lack of half-decent cost controls is not intentionally malicious. There is no mustache-twirling villain who has a great idea on how to !@#$ people out of their money. I think it's the play between incompetence and having absolutely no incentive to do anything about it (which is still a form of malice). I've used AWS for about 10 years and am by no means an expe…

All of that is by design, in a bad way.

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#93

Post by denvrede »

Hikikomori wrote: post #42

Saved >120k/month by deploying some vpc endpoints and vpc peering (rather than tgw).

VPC peering becomes ugly fast, once your network architecture becomes more complex. Because transitive peering doesn't work you're building a mesh of networks.

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#94

Post by nine_k »

antonvs wrote: post #87
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!

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.

I'd say that was irony.

BTW you can of course self-host k8s, or dokku, or whatnot, and have as easy a deployment story as with the cloud. (But not necessarily as easy a maintenance story for the whole thing.)

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#95

Post by scotty79 »

Waterluvian wrote: post #76
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…

This might be speaking the obvious, but I think that the lack of half-decent cost controls is not intentionally malicious. There is no mustache-twirling villain who has a great idea on how to !@#$ people out of their money. I think it's the play between incompetence and having absolutely no incentive to do anything about it (which is still a form of malice). I've used AWS for about 10 years and am by no means an expe…

> I think that the lack of half-decent cost controls is not intentionally malicious

It wasn't when the service was first created. What's intentionally malicious is not fixing it for years.

Somehow AI companies got this right form the get go. Money up front, no money, no tokens.

It's easy to guess why. Unlike hosting infra bs, inference is a hard cost for them. If they don't get paid, they lose (more) money. And sending stuff to collections is expensive and bad press.

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#96

Post by jrjeksjd8d »

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…

The problem with hard caps is that there's no way to retroactively fix "our site went down". As much as engineers are loathe to actually reach out to a cloud provider, are there any anecdotes of AWS playing hardball and collecting a 10k debt for network traffic?

Conversely the first time someone hits an edge case in billing limits and their site goes down, losing 10k worth of possible customer transactions there's no way to unring that bell.

The second constituency are also, you know, the customers with real cloud budgets. I don't blame AWS for not building a feature that could (a) negatively impact real, paying customers (b) is primarily targeted at people who by definition don't want to pay a lot of money.

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#97

Post by tacker2000 »

rileymat2 wrote: post #78
Raed667 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my understanding from reading this kind of threads is that there is no real way to enforce it and the provider makes no guarantees, as your usage can outpace the system that is handling the accounting and shutoff

That sounds like an architecture choice? One that would cause less revenue on the AWS side, with a conflicting incentive there.

to be fair, im not sure its a conscious choice, since its not really easy to couple lets say data transfer bytes directly to billing data in real time, and im sure that would also use up a lot of resources.

But of course, the incentive to optimize this is not there.

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#98

Post by denvrede »

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.

Good luck managing the whole day-2 operations and the application layer on top of your VPS. You're just shuffling around your spending. For you it's not on compute anymore but manpower to manage that mess.

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#99

Post by sgarland »

Waterluvian wrote: post #76
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…

This might be speaking the obvious, but I think that the lack of half-decent cost controls is not intentionally malicious. There is no mustache-twirling villain who has a great idea on how to !@#$ people out of their money. I think it's the play between incompetence and having absolutely no incentive to do anything about it (which is still a form of malice). I've used AWS for about 10 years and am by no means an expe…

> There is no mustache-twirling villain who has a great idea on how to !@#$ people out of their money.

I dunno, Aurora’s pricing structure feels an awful lot like that. “What if we made people pay for storage and I/O? And we made estimating I/O practically impossible?”

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