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From an evolutionary point of view, I find serverless appealing and exciting - a romantic idea. However, the frequent posts along the lines of "my Lambda funct

From an evolutionary point of view, I find serverless appealing and exciting - a romantic idea. However, the frequent posts along the lines of "my Lambda function was buggy and now I owe Amazon three billion dollars" definitely kills the romanticism.

WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
Honestly, we've had a lot of fun with OpenFaaS and services that can publish to it. You'd be surprised how great it is to pass a parametized query and have it turned into a function quickly. Doing stupid things on AWS is really easy and sadly billing can be up to 24 hours delayed.
- jakub_g 6y ago
  Isn't there some sort of security built-in, like "if suddenly the bill becomes 1500% the norm, kill the instance and start serving 404s"? (I know nothing about cloud, honestly curious)
  - PopeDotNinja 6y ago
    > Isn't there some sort of security built-in, like "if suddenly the bill becomes 1500% the norm, kill the instance and start serving 404s"? How about we call it auto-snailing. "I wanted to grow fast, but not THAT fast! Slow it down there buddy."
  - barkingcat 6y ago
    It's in cloud vendor's interests to charge more money regardless of mistakes. They do offer charge limits, but they don't want you to use them. There are lots of posts online that document "talk to amazon and they'll take out the extra charges" but there are even more cases where the people just pay the bill and thus amazon makes money and profit.
  - ben509 6y ago
    Nope. As the GP mentioned, billing is delayed, but you could set alarms on your lambda usage. You could even use something like X-Ray to get more insight into what your usage looks like. The problem is there's not a clear way to tell the difference between recursive calls and heavy traffic. AWS components are fundamentally a network of nodes that are sending traffic to other nodes. But there's no unifying language that can model this, so you can't describe what this graph ought to look like. (e.g. you want to be able to say "lambda Foo should be called twice for each event to Bar".) And that'd be hard to do since most nodes are general purpose computers, like Lambda and EC2, that can send traffic anywhere for arbitrarily complex reasons. Since you can't describe what it ought to look like, trying to alarm on it becomes a problem of detecting anomalies. You can sort of do it, but AWS doesn't want to do it because they'd be making a promise they couldn't generally keep.
  - WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
    OpenFaaS isn't lambda, it's a function as a service software that can be hosted as a docker container.
  - Sebb767 6y ago
    No. Amazon very much prefers uptime over cost cutting; they rather have your website up than read a story about a bill limiter taking you offline. They also tend to be quite lenient on unintended bills. Additionally, bill cutting is not that easy. Should they shut down current services? Stop sending in the middle of a newsletter? Delete your S3 Storage? Even then, a large company might accumulate hundreds or thousands of dollars within a second ; even if they decide to cut at all cost, minimal delays might break the limit. I fully agree that it sucks for experimenting; it is very much the reason I don't have an AWS account. But I can see why they don't have it.
    - dodobirdlord 6y ago
      Also, Amazon bill’s monthly. They might be able to charge by the second, but they don’t actually have an accurate to the second running count of your total bill.

WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago

Honestly, we've had a lot of fun with OpenFaaS and services that can publish to it. You'd be surprised how great it is to pass a parametized query and have it turned into a function quickly. Doing stupid things on AWS is really easy and sadly billing can be up to 24 hours delayed.

jakub_g 6y ago
Isn't there some sort of security built-in, like "if suddenly the bill becomes 1500% the norm, kill the instance and start serving 404s"? (I know nothing about cloud, honestly curious)
- PopeDotNinja 6y ago
  > Isn't there some sort of security built-in, like "if suddenly the bill becomes 1500% the norm, kill the instance and start serving 404s"? How about we call it auto-snailing. "I wanted to grow fast, but not THAT fast! Slow it down there buddy."
- barkingcat 6y ago
  It's in cloud vendor's interests to charge more money regardless of mistakes. They do offer charge limits, but they don't want you to use them. There are lots of posts online that document "talk to amazon and they'll take out the extra charges" but there are even more cases where the people just pay the bill and thus amazon makes money and profit.
- ben509 6y ago
  Nope. As the GP mentioned, billing is delayed, but you could set alarms on your lambda usage. You could even use something like X-Ray to get more insight into what your usage looks like. The problem is there's not a clear way to tell the difference between recursive calls and heavy traffic. AWS components are fundamentally a network of nodes that are sending traffic to other nodes. But there's no unifying language that can model this, so you can't describe what this graph ought to look like. (e.g. you want to be able to say "lambda Foo should be called twice for each event to Bar".) And that'd be hard to do since most nodes are general purpose computers, like Lambda and EC2, that can send traffic anywhere for arbitrarily complex reasons. Since you can't describe what it ought to look like, trying to alarm on it becomes a problem of detecting anomalies. You can sort of do it, but AWS doesn't want to do it because they'd be making a promise they couldn't generally keep.
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
  OpenFaaS isn't lambda, it's a function as a service software that can be hosted as a docker container.
- Sebb767 6y ago
  No. Amazon very much prefers uptime over cost cutting; they rather have your website up than read a story about a bill limiter taking you offline. They also tend to be quite lenient on unintended bills. Additionally, bill cutting is not that easy. Should they shut down current services? Stop sending in the middle of a newsletter? Delete your S3 Storage? Even then, a large company might accumulate hundreds or thousands of dollars within a second ; even if they decide to cut at all cost, minimal delays might break the limit. I fully agree that it sucks for experimenting; it is very much the reason I don't have an AWS account. But I can see why they don't have it.
  - dodobirdlord 6y ago
    Also, Amazon bill’s monthly. They might be able to charge by the second, but they don’t actually have an accurate to the second running count of your total bill.