6 ms·

This is the nightmare scenario with a personal AWS account. AWS billing setup makes it impossible to know that there is a giant bill until after the fact. I wis

by jrott 6y ago

This is the nightmare scenario with a personal AWS account. AWS billing setup makes it impossible to know that there is a giant bill until after the fact. I wish there was some way to limit the bill and just have everything shut down at that point for hobby projects.

jimnotgym 6y ago
This would make me move more work stuff back to AWS. I want everything to stop when I hit that limit.
- jrott 6y ago
  Interesting I'm used to megacorp life, where the AWS bill has to be really big for people to notice. I can see how it would be helpful for startups though or for services that are providing a free tier to users.
tylermenezes 6y ago
Azure has configurable billing quotas. That's half of the reason I use them. (The other half being a moderately less overwhelming UI)
smoe 6y ago
This is why for hobby projects I try to stay away from pay per use services when possible even tough they would be cheaper. Just the peace of mind of having predictable fixed cost is worth the couple bucks I might be paying more. That said, unless that spike happens in a single day, you should be able to at least set a budget alarm to warn you. I think you should also be able to trigger shutdowns from those alerts within aws, but I never did.
ldoughty 6y ago
Setting up billing alarms is easy for personal accounts, it's actually only a nightmare if you go through a reseller (which is common in government contacting). The author had an incident starting June 23rd, but didn't know about it until he got his bill July 7th, that's potentially ~14 days someone could have been abusing his account. A billing alarm would have reduced this to hours or minutes. I would be interested how you suggest stopping a bill before it happens otherwise.. should AWS disable your website because you got posted on hacker news and now have a bill over your $10 limit? If AWS needs to stop your billing at $10, then it might need to shut down your EC2 instance and destroy your data... If course they could offer the ability to configure the response, but if someone doesn't take the 2 minutes necessary to put a $25 billing alarm in place, what are the chances they will go through the effort of service/object based abuse policies? At the end of the day, the issue here was that the user posted something online that people could abuse.. I don't think any CDNs cover 30 TB in free tier...
- ghaff 6y ago
  >should AWS disable your website because you got posted on hacker news and now have a bill over your $10 limit? Maybe that should be an option? Probably not a good idea for a business but if you're just using AWS to learn and otherwise fool around with, there's a good argument that it would be nice to be able to have a hard circuit breaker for at least stateless services. I've actually heard people argue that they consider everything they put up on AWS is ephemeral so a hard circuit breaker should have the option to burn everything down but that seems like it would create its own set of problems for many people. Disabling data egress and EC2 seems as if it would go a long way towards stopping most of the unexpected bill stories. And, yes, I'm aware of billing alarms and even setting up Lambda functions to take actions but, especially if you use S3 to host files, it would be nice to cap expenses at mostly your storage costs. I was doing some research for a very small non-profit that needs some hosted storage and I think Backblaze B2 is a better choice for them for this reason.
  - Turing_Machine 6y ago
    > Maybe that should be an option? It should absolutely be an option. Maybe not the default, but an option.
  - ldoughty 6y ago
    I certainly would like the "don't book me over $X" option, but the devil is in the details. Perhaps just turning off where's would help, but if you account is compromised and 50 servers are running trying to mine crypto, the hacjer won't turn off those servers just because it's no longer submitting results... So AWS should probably stop all your servers.. which means users might lose data... Makes it a difficult choice
- arpinum 6y ago
  AWS billing alarms and cost explorer are not realtime services, you can expect a 6 hour delay. In this users case, this could be after $500 has already been spent. AWS does not do enough to prevent harm, even if a user is diligent with alarms.
- hasenpfote 6y ago
based2 6y ago
They could easily setup a threshold capped plan.
godot 6y ago
Totally this. Sure, you can set up billing alarms and all, but the point is, for personal hobby projects, it shouldn't be this easy to screw up. I've used AWS extensively professionally at my current and previous 2 or 3 companies, and I've had a personal AWS account but recently decided to close it just to be safe. I actually wondered if I could just remove my billing credit card, so I contacted AWS support about it, and they said you have to have at least one primary card on there. So the only option was to close the account. I only use a mix of Digital Ocean and Netlify and Heroku for personal projects so I might as well shut down my personal AWS account just to be safe, and I did. It's just not worth keeping one open, the risk is too great.

by jrott 6y ago

jimnotgym 6y ago

This would make me move more work stuff back to AWS. I want everything to stop when I hit that limit.

jrott 6y ago
Interesting I'm used to megacorp life, where the AWS bill has to be really big for people to notice. I can see how it would be helpful for startups though or for services that are providing a free tier to users.

tylermenezes 6y ago

Azure has configurable billing quotas. That's half of the reason I use them. (The other half being a moderately less overwhelming UI)

smoe 6y ago

This is why for hobby projects I try to stay away from pay per use services when possible even tough they would be cheaper. Just the peace of mind of having predictable fixed cost is worth the couple bucks I might be paying more. That said, unless that spike happens in a single day, you should be able to at least set a budget alarm to warn you. I think you should also be able to trigger shutdowns from those alerts within aws, but I never did.

ldoughty 6y ago

Setting up billing alarms is easy for personal accounts, it's actually only a nightmare if you go through a reseller (which is common in government contacting). The author had an incident starting June 23rd, but didn't know about it until he got his bill July 7th, that's potentially ~14 days someone could have been abusing his account. A billing alarm would have reduced this to hours or minutes. I would be interested how you suggest stopping a bill before it happens otherwise.. should AWS disable your website because you got posted on hacker news and now have a bill over your $10 limit? If AWS needs to stop your billing at $10, then it might need to shut down your EC2 instance and destroy your data... If course they could offer the ability to configure the response, but if someone doesn't take the 2 minutes necessary to put a $25 billing alarm in place, what are the chances they will go through the effort of service/object based abuse policies? At the end of the day, the issue here was that the user posted something online that people could abuse.. I don't think any CDNs cover 30 TB in free tier...

ghaff 6y ago
>should AWS disable your website because you got posted on hacker news and now have a bill over your $10 limit? Maybe that should be an option? Probably not a good idea for a business but if you're just using AWS to learn and otherwise fool around with, there's a good argument that it would be nice to be able to have a hard circuit breaker for at least stateless services. I've actually heard people argue that they consider everything they put up on AWS is ephemeral so a hard circuit breaker should have the option to burn everything down but that seems like it would create its own set of problems for many people. Disabling data egress and EC2 seems as if it would go a long way towards stopping most of the unexpected bill stories. And, yes, I'm aware of billing alarms and even setting up Lambda functions to take actions but, especially if you use S3 to host files, it would be nice to cap expenses at mostly your storage costs. I was doing some research for a very small non-profit that needs some hosted storage and I think Backblaze B2 is a better choice for them for this reason.
- Turing_Machine 6y ago
  > Maybe that should be an option? It should absolutely be an option. Maybe not the default, but an option.
- ldoughty 6y ago
  I certainly would like the "don't book me over $X" option, but the devil is in the details. Perhaps just turning off where's would help, but if you account is compromised and 50 servers are running trying to mine crypto, the hacjer won't turn off those servers just because it's no longer submitting results... So AWS should probably stop all your servers.. which means users might lose data... Makes it a difficult choice
arpinum 6y ago
AWS billing alarms and cost explorer are not realtime services, you can expect a 6 hour delay. In this users case, this could be after $500 has already been spent. AWS does not do enough to prevent harm, even if a user is diligent with alarms.
hasenpfote 6y ago

based2 6y ago

They could easily setup a threshold capped plan.

godot 6y ago

Totally this. Sure, you can set up billing alarms and all, but the point is, for personal hobby projects, it shouldn't be this easy to screw up. I've used AWS extensively professionally at my current and previous 2 or 3 companies, and I've had a personal AWS account but recently decided to close it just to be safe. I actually wondered if I could just remove my billing credit card, so I contacted AWS support about it, and they said you have to have at least one primary card on there. So the only option was to close the account. I only use a mix of Digital Ocean and Netlify and Heroku for personal projects so I might as well shut down my personal AWS account just to be safe, and I did. It's just not worth keeping one open, the risk is too great.