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No one prices to "encourage proper use." They price for a number of variables. And I do agree that arguing they're overcharging is unfair; however, SU-pricing s

No one prices to "encourage proper use." They price for a number of variables. And I do agree that arguing they're overcharging is unfair; however, SU-pricing standards include triggers for excessive use as part of the customer guarantee. If Amazon has no problem automating the product, they can automate some billing features, like notifications and bandwidth restrictions when a customer is nearing excessive use based on the population use of a particular service. Amazon's systems should have notified at least twice and required direct confirmation from the customer for their continued use. We don't just make business decisions like this based off our self-interest. In this case, a failure to be resourceful on Amazon's part gave the customer one of two options: track everything manually minute-by-minute, or be surprised by an excessive bill.

deleted 6y ago
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alFReD-NSH 6y ago
AWS does have budget notifications that you can set up with a few clicks. It doesn't come by default because AWS doesn't know what's the right amount for those notifications. I already get enough emails from AWS for every account that I make. I can actually think of possible/real workloads that would burn 2700 usd out of blue in two days and those customers would not be happy if AWS blocks their account because AWS thinks they did something wrong. AWS Support quite often happily refunds these amounts and you don't need to post to Twitter. I've seen them refund a lot more. Why haven't they done something to prevent this mistakes? They already refund these things, it's just those refunds is a drop in bucket compared to services that enterprise customers are paying for, and AWS engineers are busy building for them. AWS gives you a lot of power compared to what you can do on your average hosting provider, but sadly there's also a lot of room to shoot yourself in the foot if you don't know what you are doing.
- shiftpgdn 6y ago
  This is just making excuses for a business model built around taking advantage of small mistakes. If they actually cared they'd allow you to set billing circuit breakers on setup.
  - cameronbrown 6y ago
    It's not impossible to script this functionality if needed.
    - dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
      It's difficult enough and error-prone. What customers want is a bulletproof way not to exceed a defined spending limit. We've been asking for it for many years, and the answer has been "Yes, we hear you, we are working on it", and then nothing ever happens, because this is a strategic business decision that would affect their bottom line. Why should they do it if they don't have to?
- michaelt 6y ago
  Billing notifications aren't much use if you can run up a $1000 bill between going to bed and waking up.
  - cutemonster 6y ago
    Or a week's vacation
deanCommie 6y ago
> No one prices to "encourage proper use." Citation needed. Network throughput is a finite resource. And spikes from noisy neighbors could absolutely degrade throughput performance for everyone else. So it makes perfect sense for me that part of Amazon's pricing calculus would be based not just on the cost to deliver the feature but the amount of utilization of the overall network they expect for the use cases their pricing supports.
- hansvm 6y ago
  But...their pricing punishes a spiky neighbor exactly as much as somebody dripping a tiny amount of content steadily for a month.

deleted 6y ago

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alFReD-NSH 6y ago

AWS does have budget notifications that you can set up with a few clicks. It doesn't come by default because AWS doesn't know what's the right amount for those notifications. I already get enough emails from AWS for every account that I make. I can actually think of possible/real workloads that would burn 2700 usd out of blue in two days and those customers would not be happy if AWS blocks their account because AWS thinks they did something wrong. AWS Support quite often happily refunds these amounts and you don't need to post to Twitter. I've seen them refund a lot more. Why haven't they done something to prevent this mistakes? They already refund these things, it's just those refunds is a drop in bucket compared to services that enterprise customers are paying for, and AWS engineers are busy building for them. AWS gives you a lot of power compared to what you can do on your average hosting provider, but sadly there's also a lot of room to shoot yourself in the foot if you don't know what you are doing.

shiftpgdn 6y ago
This is just making excuses for a business model built around taking advantage of small mistakes. If they actually cared they'd allow you to set billing circuit breakers on setup.
- cameronbrown 6y ago
  It's not impossible to script this functionality if needed.
  - dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
    It's difficult enough and error-prone. What customers want is a bulletproof way not to exceed a defined spending limit. We've been asking for it for many years, and the answer has been "Yes, we hear you, we are working on it", and then nothing ever happens, because this is a strategic business decision that would affect their bottom line. Why should they do it if they don't have to?
michaelt 6y ago
Billing notifications aren't much use if you can run up a $1000 bill between going to bed and waking up.
- cutemonster 6y ago
  Or a week's vacation

deanCommie 6y ago

> No one prices to "encourage proper use." Citation needed. Network throughput is a finite resource. And spikes from noisy neighbors could absolutely degrade throughput performance for everyone else. So it makes perfect sense for me that part of Amazon's pricing calculus would be based not just on the cost to deliver the feature but the amount of utilization of the overall network they expect for the use cases their pricing supports.

hansvm 6y ago
But...their pricing punishes a spiky neighbor exactly as much as somebody dripping a tiny amount of content steadily for a month.