11 ms·

I really wish you could just designate a group of resources as unimportant, set a billing limit, and let Amazon nuke everything / delete your files / whatever,

I really wish you could just designate a group of resources as unimportant, set a billing limit, and let Amazon nuke everything / delete your files / whatever, if you go over the limit. Everytime I try to learn cloud infrastructure stuff I'm terrified of the literally infinite bill that might show up from a typo a month down the line.

WrtCdEvrydy 5y ago
If this is an issue, use Lightsail or a tier 2 provider (like DigitalOcean)
- notwedtm 5y ago
  That doesn't solve for the AWS only resources.
  - WrtCdEvrydy 5y ago
    Yeah, no fixing that. Billing can be 24 hours delayed.
- Someone1234 5y ago
  Then you aren't learning AWS, which was the stated goal.
thorin 5y ago
I think the same, it's put me off using anything but the free tier for learning. Azure was slightly better but still not ideal.
ramshanker 5y ago
If not possible to cap price, starting with the capacity limiter on S3 and bandwidth limit at VPC level would do. The possibility that someone flood the server even for static resources causing bandwidth spiked Bill is scary.
- Silhouette 5y ago
  That threat even has its own name now: a denial-of-wallet attack. The limited protections available against this threat from the big cloud providers have to be seen as a warning sign. It's only a matter of time before any small business using these services for hosting can be subject to sudden shakedowns by criminals. "Nice business-critical infrastructure you have there, be a shame if anything were to happen to it." Some of the providers do offer a DoS mitigation service, but the cost for the higher levels can start to look like a shakedown itself.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  > The possibility that someone flood the server even for static resources causing bandwidth spiked Bill is scary. Genuinely curious, is this just a side-effect of the cloud craze or did DDoS attacks become so powerful that old-school approaches of appropriately-sized bare-metal infrastructure with finite but unmetered bandwidth are no longer viable? The way I see it, you can provision enough unmetered bandwidth to cover your typical load + a safety margin at a flat rate per month, and worst case scenario if the attack is big enough you merely get downtime (allowing you to re-evaluate the situation and decide whether to throw more bandwidth at the problem or purchase attack mitigation services) instead of an infinite bill? My current ISP gives me 1Gbps unmetered. Worst case scenario the connection is saturated but at no point the ISP will come to me and ask for extra money.
  - Silhouette 5y ago
    You could still run many systems just fine on private infrastructure with at most a business-class Internet connection to your office or a colo bill for putting your servers somewhere more central. This didn't magically stop working just because someone got paid a lot of money to do PR for cloud services. By the time you take into account the financial costs and inherent risks of cloud hosting, maybe more things should still run that way than actually do. The practical problem today is that cloud now has so much mindshare, justified or otherwise, that the ecosystem around private hosting is diminished. Finding good people with the required admin skills, good sources of equipment, even good software to run local versions of automation we take for granted in the cloud, can be harder than it used to be. I won't be surprised if in a few years some huge tech firm we all thought had faded into obscurity enjoys a new lease of life by offering a set of locally hosted equivalents to popular cloud services that are also easy to administer and scale but come with a lot more predictability because they run on the customer's own infrastructure.
ctvo 5y ago
Just use the free tier? You’re notified when you’re approaching the free limit. AWS, anecdotally, has removed 5k++ mistakes I’ve made with little question. (One example they forgave due to my carelessness: ECS and Fargate service with logging to CloudWatch but with verbose logging on. The bill was 8k that month for just CloudWatch usage)
- jjoonathan 5y ago
  I have only asked for one refund, which was clearly the result of a bug on Amazon's part, and they haggled the whole way. They were quick to a 50% refund and slow to a 100% refund.
  - dexterdog 5y ago
    I've never had a refund denied. One was for 20k on an account that only billed that much monthly. If it's an honest mistake they'll wipe it if you have any history with them.
    - nucleardog 5y ago
      I've had $30k, and later $120k refunded on an account that billed ~$20-25k monthly. Both covered 100% of the overage. AWS is the one major tech company where I've never had any issue getting in touch with a real human who has been empowered to actually fix my issues. The only thing that's been required from us was to show them we were taking reasonable steps to prevent it happening again.
- onion2k 5y ago
  It's great that they forgave you. I know a startup that incurred a $30k bill that they didn't forgive. The startup folded. AWS's unknowable policy for the cost of errors represents a huge risk for individuals and small businesses. It puts a lot of people off.
  - ctvo 5y ago
    I'm sorry, what? > AWS's unknowable policy for the cost of errors represents a huge risk for individuals and small businesses. Assume you're paying for your own mistakes, and be thankful when you don't have to? That's a pretty easy policy.
itsibitzi 5y ago
I've read that some people use a pre-paid credit card with a $1 spending limit when setting up their playground accounts. Seems like a reasonable approach.
- adriancr 5y ago
  You will still owe the incurred charges and AWS can send it to collections.
  - ValentineC 5y ago
    AWS is oddly dysfunctional recently. They nerfed the $100 of AWS credits for Alexa developers with zero notice this month, which caused me to incur overages this and last month. I've gotten last month's bill waived, but still received a passive-aggressive email with bad English by a Territory Account Sales person from my region about how my account could be suspended, if I didn't reply to the email within the day. I'm not sure I would trust said person to handle my accounts, even if I was on a corporate budget. I'm still in the process of moving most of my workload away from AWS.
  - donmcronald 5y ago
    I do this. I’d much rather have AWS needing to call me to negotiate / collect than having $15k go through my CC as a legit authorized charge.
    - cube00 5y ago
      Unless they call you, refuse to negotiate and still send it to collections as it is (at least in their mind) a legitimate charge. All these stories of providers giving "good will" credit for these massive charges really concerns me when you look at how other parts of these companies ignore their customers or only reply with scripted responses.
- randompwd 5y ago
  That doesn't make much sense. You would still be on the hook for the eventual bill. This sounds like a showerthought hashtag lifehack.
akh 5y ago
> I'm terrified of the literally infinite bill that might show up from a typo a month down the line Whilst this might sound funny, we were surprised to see it as a common use-cases with users putting https://github.com/infracost/infracost https://github.com/infracost/infracost in their CI/CD pipelines to act as safety net. Currently it only works for Terraform users, but we plan to add other infra-as-code tools in the future. We're also discussing how we can do this for people who don't use infra-as-code in https://github.com/infracost/infracost/issues/840 https://github.com/infracost/infracost/issues/840 but it's not clear what the workflow could look like for them. Perhaps having separate AWS accounts with a budget alert that emails you to run https://github.com/rebuy-de/aws-nuke https://github.com/rebuy-de/aws-nuke is a work-around just now. (I'm co-founder of Infracost)
- YetAnotherNick 5y ago
  I think most of the cost for medium-large sized business are elastic(number of pods, bandwidth cost depends on requests per second, storage cost for many things increases linearly with users etc).
  - akh 5y ago
    Yep - it seems to depend on the architecture too (e.g. companies that lift-and-shift to the cloud use VMs heavily). We're discussing ideas on https://github.com/infracost/infracost/issues/730 https://github.com/infracost/infracost/issues/730, e.g. could CloudWatch be used to fetch the usage so user has context of what those elastic services used last week/month.
    - YetAnotherNick 5y ago
      Didn't imagined that this functionality would be present. Looks very useful and I would try it out for my terraform setup!
- koolba 5y ago
  > Perhaps having separate AWS accounts ... You absolutely must, MUST, MUST be using separate AWS accounts for separate purposes. You can have as many as you’d like and roll up the billing into one actual paying account. This is a win for accountability (roll up dev and easily see the split out for separate environments), but more importantly for security as it limits the blast radius for any one environment. Combined with per-account budget alerts it’s a win across the board.
ZeroCool2u 5y ago
I think GCP's official method for doing this is pretty similar to what you describe. You basically create a cloud function that disables billing if your bill goes over a configured limit. It's not perfect, because there's a tiny bit of lag between usage and billing calculation, but you'll only end up with a few dollars over the limit instead of thousands. Truly the nuclear option though.
- outloudvi 5y ago
  Oh, on the GCP story I was always reminded of this: https://blog.tomilkieway.com/72k-1/ https://blog.tomilkieway.com/72k-1/
  - ZeroCool2u 5y ago
    Wow, well they had some pretty fundamental design problems that the author points out. Infinite recursion due to back linking is a pretty easy way to max out your bill. I'm glad that Google forgave the bill at least.
- Terretta 5y ago
  > GCP's official method for doing this is … a cloud function that disables billing if your bill goes over a configured limit I’d love it if GCP’s official method were to disable billing if your bill went over a limit. Sadly, I suspect it would just disable systems instead.
  - nucleardog 5y ago
    How does "disabling billing" but not "disabling systems" work? Is this like asking the phone company "When I reach my plan limits, stop charging me money but let me keep making calls?"
    - Terretta 5y ago
      That was my point. I think GP was incorrect in the mechanism there. I quoted GP verbatim, they said disable billing rather than disable service or delivery or system.
weinzierl 5y ago
Oh yes, please. And to all the other commenters that suggest workarounds: Yes, better than nothing, but not exactly a solution to get beginners on board. AWS is complicated enough even without all the billing headaches.
varelse 5y ago
Single most obvious customer obsessed (their tenet BTW) feature they could add, but after over a decade of requests, it's seemingly clear they won't. It keeps me from playing with AWS for side projects as well. Their loss.
- danpalmer 5y ago
  This is something that everyone seems to ask for (I know I'd love it), but they haven't implemented it. To me that suggests that they _can't_. My guess is that billing lags enough that they can't stick to a price cap, which means that they either have to guarantee the price cap and swallow the difference, which could be exploited by malicious users to get free compute, or they have to say that there's a delay on it which makes the cap fairly useless. Some of these services are billed by such small increments I can't even imagine how complex billing for them is in practice. I'd be surprised if bills are eventually consistent within 24 hours. I wouldn't be surprised if we see an announcement like billing being guaranteed after 1 hour at some point in the not too distant future, but I'd be surprised if we see realtime caps.
  - ValentineC 5y ago
    Oddly enough, Budgets seem to work, since I've gotten alerted to runaway services fast enough (I set it at 80% of my previously-free monthly AWS credits) to be able to log in and fix them, or shut them down.
  - varelse 5y ago
    When I fill my tank with gas, there's a preauthorization with my credit card before I'm allowed to pump a single drop. It seems like a similar arrangement could be made here w/r to hourly level billing. And it would be a huge improvement over the current situation which scares me away.
  - Hokusai 5y ago
    > This is something that everyone seems to ask for (I know I'd love it), but they haven't implemented it. To me that suggests that they _can't_. Or maybe it is a costly implementation that would not bring any profits. The strange thing is that the lack of this feature seems too incur a cost as it causes more calls to customer support. So, maybe it's that implement this feature will reduce profit more that it will reduce cost.
roystonvassey 5y ago
That fear of a huge bill is real and much more common than you think.
- dimitrios1 5y ago
  It's a rational fear as well. It happens more often than one would think.
mediamachiner 5y ago
This terrifying scenario is kinda common. We've come across a bunch of tweets like: https://twitter.com/alexwlchan/status/1399095011178958851 https://twitter.com/alexwlchan/status/1399095011178958851 This inspired us to add billing limits to our SaaS product so that users don't have be in scary situations with bill run offs: https://mediamachine.io/blog/protect-your-customers-with-billing-limits/ https://mediamachine.io/blog/protect-your-customers-with-bil...
dom96 5y ago
This is the reason I have always stayed away from AWS and stuck to Digital Ocean/Linode. I'm sure I'm not the only one. But I am always surprised to see people complaining about this and still using AWS.
Saris 5y ago
Yeah it has firmly kept me away from AWS, Google cloud, and similar. I use Vultr or Digitalocean if I need a server somewhere because at least it's just a pre-set cost.
- ValentineC 5y ago
  > I use Vultr or Digitalocean if I need a server somewhere because at least it's just a pre-set cost. To be fair, AWS Lightsail should be an option too. Lightsail machines come with a fairly competitive amount of bandwidth.
- budhajeewa 5y ago
  Absolutely this! The uncertainty freaks me out. I don't have money to pay thousands of dollars as a result of some bug or attack. I'm in love with DigitalOcean because you know the price you'd pay each month. If it's just 5 USD or 5000 USD, it's what you expected, nothing more. I believe the rest of the clan (Linode, Vultr, etc.) give you the same certainty.
- Rd6n6 5y ago
  Can you not get charged for bandwidth overages? What happens if you use 3x your transfer limit?
  - Saris 5y ago
    My VPS shuts down and I get an email at 95% usage I think, I can turn it back on if needed and pay for more bandwidth.
bostonsre 5y ago
I think confusion around billing has to be intentional at this point. I would guess they are making >$1b every year due to users not understanding the consequences of their actions fully.
kelp 5y ago
Unfortunately it's also not just resources that cost money. A couple of fun billing surprises I've seen. 1. A bug in a system that uploaded quite a lot of data to Amazon S3 caused it to hit the S3 API to the tune of about $10K/day. Because AWS billing is usually 2-3 days lagged, it took us 3 days to notice. We fixed it right away once we found it. Goodby to that $30K. 2. An engineer did an Athena query that happened to walk many TB of data. And they unknowingly did it in us-west-2, but the data was in us-east-1. So that resulted in a cross region transfer to the tune of $10K for that single query.
- veonik 5y ago
  Did you contact support in either event? Just curious if they were at all willing to adjust your bill.
ryan29 5y ago
> I really wish you could just designate a group of resources as unimportant, set a billing limit, and let Amazon nuke everything / delete your files / whatever, if you go over the limit. That's exactly how it should work. It would even be useful if I could designate my development / testing account as unimportant by default so everything can be nuked to limit spending. I think it's the kind of thing that will only be solved by regulation. The government needs to institute the concept of capped overages for cloud providers where if I set my budget to $100 / month they aren't allowed to send me a 100x bill for $10k. Here's the 9 year old request for the same thing on Azure. https://feedback.azure.com/forums/170030-signup-and-billing/suggestions/3238796-spending-limit-or-maximum-cost-cap-for-azure https://feedback.azure.com/forums/170030-signup-and-billing/... I politely asked @AzureSupport (on Twitter) if they could have someone provide an update, but they didn't deliver on their promise to follow up :-(
michrassena 5y ago
This is probably what I find most frustrating about the way things are done now. I'd really like to get some idea of how these cloud services work. Every time I'm stopped by the concern that I'd rack up a huge bill and have to rely on the goodwill of a large corporation to have the debt forgiven. I understand the role and the necessity for "the cloud", but it's a re-invention of the role of the mainframe. I hate seeing one of the most notable aspects of the microcomputer era go away which the ability of a motivated individual to gain computer skills using an individual's resources.
- mr_toad 5y ago
  > a re-invention of the role of the mainframe. A publicly accessible mainframe, where anyone anywhere in the world can script the provision of machines and other resources with little more than terminal and a text editor. That would have been utopian science fiction in the heyday of the mainframe.
gchamonlive 5y ago
This is not to be dismissed. AWS billing is too opaque[1] and a misconfigured or buggy plugin can very well trigger resources infinitely[2] to a big nasty surprise. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21694835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21694835 [2] https://wordpress.org/support/topic/amazon-cloudfront-invalidations/#post-10478298 https://wordpress.org/support/topic/amazon-cloudfront-invali...

WrtCdEvrydy 5y ago

If this is an issue, use Lightsail or a tier 2 provider (like DigitalOcean)

notwedtm 5y ago
That doesn't solve for the AWS only resources.
- WrtCdEvrydy 5y ago
  Yeah, no fixing that. Billing can be 24 hours delayed.
Someone1234 5y ago
Then you aren't learning AWS, which was the stated goal.

thorin 5y ago

I think the same, it's put me off using anything but the free tier for learning. Azure was slightly better but still not ideal.

ramshanker 5y ago

If not possible to cap price, starting with the capacity limiter on S3 and bandwidth limit at VPC level would do. The possibility that someone flood the server even for static resources causing bandwidth spiked Bill is scary.

Silhouette 5y ago
That threat even has its own name now: a denial-of-wallet attack. The limited protections available against this threat from the big cloud providers have to be seen as a warning sign. It's only a matter of time before any small business using these services for hosting can be subject to sudden shakedowns by criminals. "Nice business-critical infrastructure you have there, be a shame if anything were to happen to it." Some of the providers do offer a DoS mitigation service, but the cost for the higher levels can start to look like a shakedown itself.
Nextgrid 5y ago
> The possibility that someone flood the server even for static resources causing bandwidth spiked Bill is scary. Genuinely curious, is this just a side-effect of the cloud craze or did DDoS attacks become so powerful that old-school approaches of appropriately-sized bare-metal infrastructure with finite but unmetered bandwidth are no longer viable? The way I see it, you can provision enough unmetered bandwidth to cover your typical load + a safety margin at a flat rate per month, and worst case scenario if the attack is big enough you merely get downtime (allowing you to re-evaluate the situation and decide whether to throw more bandwidth at the problem or purchase attack mitigation services) instead of an infinite bill? My current ISP gives me 1Gbps unmetered. Worst case scenario the connection is saturated but at no point the ISP will come to me and ask for extra money.
- Silhouette 5y ago
  You could still run many systems just fine on private infrastructure with at most a business-class Internet connection to your office or a colo bill for putting your servers somewhere more central. This didn't magically stop working just because someone got paid a lot of money to do PR for cloud services. By the time you take into account the financial costs and inherent risks of cloud hosting, maybe more things should still run that way than actually do. The practical problem today is that cloud now has so much mindshare, justified or otherwise, that the ecosystem around private hosting is diminished. Finding good people with the required admin skills, good sources of equipment, even good software to run local versions of automation we take for granted in the cloud, can be harder than it used to be. I won't be surprised if in a few years some huge tech firm we all thought had faded into obscurity enjoys a new lease of life by offering a set of locally hosted equivalents to popular cloud services that are also easy to administer and scale but come with a lot more predictability because they run on the customer's own infrastructure.

ctvo 5y ago

Just use the free tier? You’re notified when you’re approaching the free limit. AWS, anecdotally, has removed 5k++ mistakes I’ve made with little question. (One example they forgave due to my carelessness: ECS and Fargate service with logging to CloudWatch but with verbose logging on. The bill was 8k that month for just CloudWatch usage)

jjoonathan 5y ago
I have only asked for one refund, which was clearly the result of a bug on Amazon's part, and they haggled the whole way. They were quick to a 50% refund and slow to a 100% refund.
- dexterdog 5y ago
  I've never had a refund denied. One was for 20k on an account that only billed that much monthly. If it's an honest mistake they'll wipe it if you have any history with them.
  - nucleardog 5y ago
    I've had $30k, and later $120k refunded on an account that billed ~$20-25k monthly. Both covered 100% of the overage. AWS is the one major tech company where I've never had any issue getting in touch with a real human who has been empowered to actually fix my issues. The only thing that's been required from us was to show them we were taking reasonable steps to prevent it happening again.
onion2k 5y ago
It's great that they forgave you. I know a startup that incurred a $30k bill that they didn't forgive. The startup folded. AWS's unknowable policy for the cost of errors represents a huge risk for individuals and small businesses. It puts a lot of people off.
- ctvo 5y ago
  I'm sorry, what? > AWS's unknowable policy for the cost of errors represents a huge risk for individuals and small businesses. Assume you're paying for your own mistakes, and be thankful when you don't have to? That's a pretty easy policy.

itsibitzi 5y ago

I've read that some people use a pre-paid credit card with a $1 spending limit when setting up their playground accounts. Seems like a reasonable approach.

adriancr 5y ago
You will still owe the incurred charges and AWS can send it to collections.
- ValentineC 5y ago
  AWS is oddly dysfunctional recently. They nerfed the $100 of AWS credits for Alexa developers with zero notice this month, which caused me to incur overages this and last month. I've gotten last month's bill waived, but still received a passive-aggressive email with bad English by a Territory Account Sales person from my region about how my account could be suspended, if I didn't reply to the email within the day. I'm not sure I would trust said person to handle my accounts, even if I was on a corporate budget. I'm still in the process of moving most of my workload away from AWS.
- donmcronald 5y ago
  I do this. I’d much rather have AWS needing to call me to negotiate / collect than having $15k go through my CC as a legit authorized charge.
  - cube00 5y ago
    Unless they call you, refuse to negotiate and still send it to collections as it is (at least in their mind) a legitimate charge. All these stories of providers giving "good will" credit for these massive charges really concerns me when you look at how other parts of these companies ignore their customers or only reply with scripted responses.
randompwd 5y ago
That doesn't make much sense. You would still be on the hook for the eventual bill. This sounds like a showerthought hashtag lifehack.

akh 5y ago

> I'm terrified of the literally infinite bill that might show up from a typo a month down the line Whilst this might sound funny, we were surprised to see it as a common use-cases with users putting https://github.com/infracost/infracost https://github.com/infracost/infracost in their CI/CD pipelines to act as safety net. Currently it only works for Terraform users, but we plan to add other infra-as-code tools in the future. We're also discussing how we can do this for people who don't use infra-as-code in https://github.com/infracost/infracost/issues/840 https://github.com/infracost/infracost/issues/840 but it's not clear what the workflow could look like for them. Perhaps having separate AWS accounts with a budget alert that emails you to run https://github.com/rebuy-de/aws-nuke https://github.com/rebuy-de/aws-nuke is a work-around just now. (I'm co-founder of Infracost)

YetAnotherNick 5y ago
I think most of the cost for medium-large sized business are elastic(number of pods, bandwidth cost depends on requests per second, storage cost for many things increases linearly with users etc).
- akh 5y ago
  Yep - it seems to depend on the architecture too (e.g. companies that lift-and-shift to the cloud use VMs heavily). We're discussing ideas on https://github.com/infracost/infracost/issues/730 https://github.com/infracost/infracost/issues/730, e.g. could CloudWatch be used to fetch the usage so user has context of what those elastic services used last week/month.
  - YetAnotherNick 5y ago
    Didn't imagined that this functionality would be present. Looks very useful and I would try it out for my terraform setup!
koolba 5y ago
> Perhaps having separate AWS accounts ... You absolutely must, MUST, MUST be using separate AWS accounts for separate purposes. You can have as many as you’d like and roll up the billing into one actual paying account. This is a win for accountability (roll up dev and easily see the split out for separate environments), but more importantly for security as it limits the blast radius for any one environment. Combined with per-account budget alerts it’s a win across the board.

ZeroCool2u 5y ago

I think GCP's official method for doing this is pretty similar to what you describe. You basically create a cloud function that disables billing if your bill goes over a configured limit. It's not perfect, because there's a tiny bit of lag between usage and billing calculation, but you'll only end up with a few dollars over the limit instead of thousands. Truly the nuclear option though.

outloudvi 5y ago
Oh, on the GCP story I was always reminded of this: https://blog.tomilkieway.com/72k-1/ https://blog.tomilkieway.com/72k-1/
- ZeroCool2u 5y ago
  Wow, well they had some pretty fundamental design problems that the author points out. Infinite recursion due to back linking is a pretty easy way to max out your bill. I'm glad that Google forgave the bill at least.
Terretta 5y ago
> GCP's official method for doing this is … a cloud function that disables billing if your bill goes over a configured limit I’d love it if GCP’s official method were to disable billing if your bill went over a limit. Sadly, I suspect it would just disable systems instead.
- nucleardog 5y ago
  How does "disabling billing" but not "disabling systems" work? Is this like asking the phone company "When I reach my plan limits, stop charging me money but let me keep making calls?"
  - Terretta 5y ago
    That was my point. I think GP was incorrect in the mechanism there. I quoted GP verbatim, they said disable billing rather than disable service or delivery or system.

weinzierl 5y ago

Oh yes, please. And to all the other commenters that suggest workarounds: Yes, better than nothing, but not exactly a solution to get beginners on board. AWS is complicated enough even without all the billing headaches.

varelse 5y ago

Single most obvious customer obsessed (their tenet BTW) feature they could add, but after over a decade of requests, it's seemingly clear they won't. It keeps me from playing with AWS for side projects as well. Their loss.

danpalmer 5y ago
This is something that everyone seems to ask for (I know I'd love it), but they haven't implemented it. To me that suggests that they _can't_. My guess is that billing lags enough that they can't stick to a price cap, which means that they either have to guarantee the price cap and swallow the difference, which could be exploited by malicious users to get free compute, or they have to say that there's a delay on it which makes the cap fairly useless. Some of these services are billed by such small increments I can't even imagine how complex billing for them is in practice. I'd be surprised if bills are eventually consistent within 24 hours. I wouldn't be surprised if we see an announcement like billing being guaranteed after 1 hour at some point in the not too distant future, but I'd be surprised if we see realtime caps.
- ValentineC 5y ago
  Oddly enough, Budgets seem to work, since I've gotten alerted to runaway services fast enough (I set it at 80% of my previously-free monthly AWS credits) to be able to log in and fix them, or shut them down.
- varelse 5y ago
  When I fill my tank with gas, there's a preauthorization with my credit card before I'm allowed to pump a single drop. It seems like a similar arrangement could be made here w/r to hourly level billing. And it would be a huge improvement over the current situation which scares me away.
- Hokusai 5y ago
  > This is something that everyone seems to ask for (I know I'd love it), but they haven't implemented it. To me that suggests that they _can't_. Or maybe it is a costly implementation that would not bring any profits. The strange thing is that the lack of this feature seems too incur a cost as it causes more calls to customer support. So, maybe it's that implement this feature will reduce profit more that it will reduce cost.

roystonvassey 5y ago

That fear of a huge bill is real and much more common than you think.

dimitrios1 5y ago
It's a rational fear as well. It happens more often than one would think.

mediamachiner 5y ago

This terrifying scenario is kinda common. We've come across a bunch of tweets like: https://twitter.com/alexwlchan/status/1399095011178958851 https://twitter.com/alexwlchan/status/1399095011178958851 This inspired us to add billing limits to our SaaS product so that users don't have be in scary situations with bill run offs: https://mediamachine.io/blog/protect-your-customers-with-billing-limits/ https://mediamachine.io/blog/protect-your-customers-with-bil...

dom96 5y ago

This is the reason I have always stayed away from AWS and stuck to Digital Ocean/Linode. I'm sure I'm not the only one. But I am always surprised to see people complaining about this and still using AWS.

Saris 5y ago

Yeah it has firmly kept me away from AWS, Google cloud, and similar. I use Vultr or Digitalocean if I need a server somewhere because at least it's just a pre-set cost.

ValentineC 5y ago
> I use Vultr or Digitalocean if I need a server somewhere because at least it's just a pre-set cost. To be fair, AWS Lightsail should be an option too. Lightsail machines come with a fairly competitive amount of bandwidth.
budhajeewa 5y ago
Absolutely this! The uncertainty freaks me out. I don't have money to pay thousands of dollars as a result of some bug or attack. I'm in love with DigitalOcean because you know the price you'd pay each month. If it's just 5 USD or 5000 USD, it's what you expected, nothing more. I believe the rest of the clan (Linode, Vultr, etc.) give you the same certainty.
Rd6n6 5y ago
Can you not get charged for bandwidth overages? What happens if you use 3x your transfer limit?
- Saris 5y ago
  My VPS shuts down and I get an email at 95% usage I think, I can turn it back on if needed and pay for more bandwidth.

bostonsre 5y ago

I think confusion around billing has to be intentional at this point. I would guess they are making >$1b every year due to users not understanding the consequences of their actions fully.

kelp 5y ago

Unfortunately it's also not just resources that cost money. A couple of fun billing surprises I've seen. 1. A bug in a system that uploaded quite a lot of data to Amazon S3 caused it to hit the S3 API to the tune of about $10K/day. Because AWS billing is usually 2-3 days lagged, it took us 3 days to notice. We fixed it right away once we found it. Goodby to that $30K. 2. An engineer did an Athena query that happened to walk many TB of data. And they unknowingly did it in us-west-2, but the data was in us-east-1. So that resulted in a cross region transfer to the tune of $10K for that single query.

veonik 5y ago
Did you contact support in either event? Just curious if they were at all willing to adjust your bill.

ryan29 5y ago

> I really wish you could just designate a group of resources as unimportant, set a billing limit, and let Amazon nuke everything / delete your files / whatever, if you go over the limit. That's exactly how it should work. It would even be useful if I could designate my development / testing account as unimportant by default so everything can be nuked to limit spending. I think it's the kind of thing that will only be solved by regulation. The government needs to institute the concept of capped overages for cloud providers where if I set my budget to $100 / month they aren't allowed to send me a 100x bill for $10k. Here's the 9 year old request for the same thing on Azure. https://feedback.azure.com/forums/170030-signup-and-billing/suggestions/3238796-spending-limit-or-maximum-cost-cap-for-azure https://feedback.azure.com/forums/170030-signup-and-billing/... I politely asked @AzureSupport (on Twitter) if they could have someone provide an update, but they didn't deliver on their promise to follow up :-(

michrassena 5y ago

This is probably what I find most frustrating about the way things are done now. I'd really like to get some idea of how these cloud services work. Every time I'm stopped by the concern that I'd rack up a huge bill and have to rely on the goodwill of a large corporation to have the debt forgiven. I understand the role and the necessity for "the cloud", but it's a re-invention of the role of the mainframe. I hate seeing one of the most notable aspects of the microcomputer era go away which the ability of a motivated individual to gain computer skills using an individual's resources.

mr_toad 5y ago
> a re-invention of the role of the mainframe. A publicly accessible mainframe, where anyone anywhere in the world can script the provision of machines and other resources with little more than terminal and a text editor. That would have been utopian science fiction in the heyday of the mainframe.

gchamonlive 5y ago

This is not to be dismissed. AWS billing is too opaque[1] and a misconfigured or buggy plugin can very well trigger resources infinitely[2] to a big nasty surprise. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21694835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21694835 [2] https://wordpress.org/support/topic/amazon-cloudfront-invalidations/#post-10478298 https://wordpress.org/support/topic/amazon-cloudfront-invali...