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> AWS isn't perfect but at least you have half a chance of working out what is costing you money through the billing console. The first few times I used AWS fo

by a5aAqU 5y ago

> AWS isn't perfect but at least you have half a chance of working out what is costing you money through the billing console. The first few times I used AWS for tutorials, something similar happened to me. I thought I shut everything down, but kept getting billed and wasn't able to find it without contacting them. It was just a few dollars, but I've been wary about any services where you can't cap the billing. Cloud platforms generally don't let users cap the billing, because those overages are good income for them. I prefer using services like DigitalOcean or Linode where you can be sure that your new site crashes for 15 minutes instead of bankrupting you.

StratusBen 5y ago
Disclosure that I'm the Co-Founder and CEO of Vantage - and used to work at both AWS and DigitalOcean....but this is a large reason we offer a fairly generous free tier on https://vantage.sh/ https://vantage.sh/ to help folks figure out where their costs are coming from to take action. It can be really frustrating and annoying when you can't hunt down where costs come from.
- resonious 5y ago
  I'm nitpicking on unimportant details here but this seems like more of a general UI/UX problem than a free tier problem. AWS and Azure both have pretty straightforward free tiers, but people end up accidentally racking up large bills anyway. A UI to see a list of running services, sorted by cost either doesn't exist or is not prominent enough.
  - aaronblohowiak 5y ago
    vantage looks like a cost analyzer. vantage free tier will help you find non-free tier issues on AWS, if i understand the GP's point.
  - l-p 5y ago
    In Azure: Sidebar -> Cost Management + Billing -> Cost Management -> Cost analysis (preview). It's slow, you can't open links in new tabs, one wrong click and you have navigate to the right page and wait for everything to refresh again, but you can get the list of billed items. Plus a "Other subscription charges" that contains some mystery costs not linked to anything.
    - MichaelZuo 5y ago
      ‘ contains some mystery costs not linked to anything’ Hard to believe that really is the case for a product targeting serious customers in 2021. Doesn’t that make a surprise bill still possible?
      - ethbr0 5y ago
        The state of cloud billing seems like exactly the result you'd get if you didn't have a strong mandate that product teams implement a unified, centralized billing interface. And it makes sense from a growth perspective: new products grow revenue, bad billing systems only annoy customers (but mostly invisibly).
  - StratusBen 5y ago
    I mean't the Vantage free tier - not the AWS/Azure free tiers. The UI to see a list of running services, sorted by cost is precisely what Vantage offers (and more)
- Bombthecat 5y ago
  It's kinda telling that you need an external service, to figure out where your money goes..
- telesilla 5y ago
  We have services across a lot of cloud providers, Google and Azure for a variety off things, Digital Ocean for some and the main stuff on AWS. I'd love it if a service such as Vantage could track them all, I can only find solutions for AWS.
sylens 5y ago
I feel like a lot of cloud platform tutorials out there should start with having you create a billing alarm that emails you when the bill crosses a reasonable but higher than expected amount. For basic tutorials, that might be something like $20.
- smackeyacky 5y ago
  This is a great idea!
- c618b9b695c4 5y ago
  I would feel even better if there was a Shutdown-Everything at $20 threshold.
audiometry 5y ago
Oh me too. That horrible "mythical beasts" tutorial. I thought I removed it, and then each month for the next two months I'd get nailed for 50? dollars or so. By definition, I don't understand AWS, so figuring out how to turn it off was nearly impossible. AWS "support" didn't exist. Stackoverflow AWS geeks were in high dudgeon that I'd ask the question, "how do i disable this?" and would kill my question. Finally some kind soul did give me the trick to finding the last service to disable. BTW the tutorial is absolutely useless. Just a thousand different incantations to repeat. No real understanding communicated. Felt more like an ad for myriad services. 0/10 would not recommend.
- alchermd 5y ago
  I understand what you feel completely. I actually wasn't even able to complete the tutorial since the commands given would trigger a permission error one way or another. I got charged $50 as well since I wasn't aware that there's still services running. Such a terrible thing to front as a "Getting Started" guide.
- danjac 5y ago
  There are consultancies whose entire expertise and premise are advising on AWS billing to companies who already know AWS, so the idea that a newbie should be aware of whatever magical incantation to limit their spend is ludicrous.
  - laumars 5y ago
    That’s not entirely fair. While I’m not going to defend the complexity of billing in enterprise cloud services it’s also not really that hard to set an billing alert in CloudWatch and track spend in Cost Explorer. Sure it requires a little bit of AWS knowledge but you shouldn’t really be using enterprise services like AWS (over other more accessible services like Digital Oceans) if you’re not willing to spend the time learning it; and at an individual level it’s very manageable. The reason those consultancy firms exist is because billing scales terribly. Once you’re a business using AWS you’d likely have a multitude of projects running across a multitude of departments which need to be billed to a multitude of different customers and internet cost centres. This all needs to be processed by an internal 3rd party financial system managed by non-technical people who wont even know what AWS stands for let alone what it does and how it works. In those situations the problem of billing becomes exponentially more difficult than a one person hobby project.
Sebb767 5y ago
> Cloud platforms generally don't let users cap the billing, because those overages are good income for them. No. They don't have caps because it's really hard to implement and because the negative press of an app going down because the cloud didn't scale is far worse than any received by surprise bills. Scaling is a large chunk of what you're paying for, after all. This is quite obvious when you look at how lenient AWS is with retracting surprise bills. And the money perspective doesn't make sense, either: AWS is living on customers that have bills in the 5 figure range and up. The occasional 10$ from someone playing around aren't even a drop in the bucket.
- kortilla 5y ago
  Caps are not hard to implement. That’s a bullshit excuse. If they can bill it they can stop it.
  - Sebb767 5y ago
    You sure? Say your app is reaching the cap. What do you do with ongoing costs? Do you block writes? Shut down VMs? Delete stored data? So you might say, simply project the cost (with some magic) and prevent that from going over the limit. So, imagine, your app suddenly experiences a load peak and you need to scale up. However, adding a VM would increase that projection too much. Do you not scale, despite this possibily being a small load peak, and let the app go down? Or do you risk the situation described above? Doesn't matter, you'll get bad press either way. And beyond that, you'd still need to project costs like traffic volume, which can vary extremely. Not to say anything about the technical difficulties of coordinating that billing information across hundreds of services in real time. And even if you do all that, you still get bad press of the likes of "we forgot to remove our payment limit and it killed our app while being on the front page (and our alert did not trigger because we couldn't afford another mail)". There's no way AWS (or any other cloud) is eating all these drawbacks just to have a limit. I bet it's orders of magnitude cheaper to just eat the occasional surprise bill.
    - ed_elliott_asc 5y ago
      I get $150 azure credit a month - my subscription has no credit card attached, when I reach the limit everything shuts down. Azure have the ability to stop everything at a specific limit - they choose not to make it available,
snoman 5y ago
One of the first things you do when learning AWS via A Cloud Guru is setup a billing alarm. I have one that goes off monthly at about how much I expect to spend in a month.
danjac 5y ago
My rule of thumb is to avoid the cloud entirely unless my employer is paying for it. Otherwise, like you said, I'll stick with a fixed amount a month.
hcazz 5y ago
I'm convinced folks who complain about "unexpected recurring small bills on AWS" have never taken the five minutes it takes to learn to using the billing console. It's like asking why the knife you're using keeps cutting you when you put your finger on the sharp end. Learn to use your tools, and they won't surprise you. Learn to track your costs, and you won't have unexplainable recurring bills.
- pojzon 5y ago
  Yup I also do find those arguments ridiculous. „I cut myself because I dont know how to use knifes, but its the knife fault fpr cutting me”. You can even enable scans for unused respurces that generate costs..
- papaf 5y ago
  It's like asking why the knife you're using keeps cutting you when you put your finger on the sharp end. Most cloud providers don't have this billing problem and so the analogy breaks. Its more like, why does this knife keep shooting me in the foot?
- aiCeivi9 5y ago
  > five minutes it takes to learn to using the billing console. I spent hour or two trying to find anything running and didn't find a damn thing. Yet Amazon decided to charge me a buck or two every month for "storage" so I just canceled whole account. I mean, if I can't find what I am paying for when not using it, how am I supposed to understand the bill when I actually have a dozen of instances?
- CJefferson 5y ago
  That's a good comparison. Have you ever cut yourself with a knife, any time in your life? I certainly have. I've also had a £150 AWS charge I had to pay. In both cases I learnt my lesson. I'm careful not to put my fingers where a knife can cut it, and to not put my bank details where AWS can charge them.
  - lordlimecat 5y ago
    Were in a room with 150 engineers, techies, and problem solvers who have been asked whether a cutting implement is overly complex or dangerous. 100 of them have provided an opinion and 99 of the opinions are that it is. Everyone in the room is bleeding. I think it's fair to say that there's an issue with the tool, Stockholm syndrome not withstanding.
joeberon 5y ago
Exact same thing happened to me too

by a5aAqU 5y ago

StratusBen 5y ago

Disclosure that I'm the Co-Founder and CEO of Vantage - and used to work at both AWS and DigitalOcean....but this is a large reason we offer a fairly generous free tier on https://vantage.sh/ https://vantage.sh/ to help folks figure out where their costs are coming from to take action. It can be really frustrating and annoying when you can't hunt down where costs come from.

resonious 5y ago
I'm nitpicking on unimportant details here but this seems like more of a general UI/UX problem than a free tier problem. AWS and Azure both have pretty straightforward free tiers, but people end up accidentally racking up large bills anyway. A UI to see a list of running services, sorted by cost either doesn't exist or is not prominent enough.
- aaronblohowiak 5y ago
  vantage looks like a cost analyzer. vantage free tier will help you find non-free tier issues on AWS, if i understand the GP's point.
- l-p 5y ago
  In Azure: Sidebar -> Cost Management + Billing -> Cost Management -> Cost analysis (preview). It's slow, you can't open links in new tabs, one wrong click and you have navigate to the right page and wait for everything to refresh again, but you can get the list of billed items. Plus a "Other subscription charges" that contains some mystery costs not linked to anything.
  - MichaelZuo 5y ago
    ‘ contains some mystery costs not linked to anything’ Hard to believe that really is the case for a product targeting serious customers in 2021. Doesn’t that make a surprise bill still possible?
    - ethbr0 5y ago
      The state of cloud billing seems like exactly the result you'd get if you didn't have a strong mandate that product teams implement a unified, centralized billing interface. And it makes sense from a growth perspective: new products grow revenue, bad billing systems only annoy customers (but mostly invisibly).
- StratusBen 5y ago
  I mean't the Vantage free tier - not the AWS/Azure free tiers. The UI to see a list of running services, sorted by cost is precisely what Vantage offers (and more)
Bombthecat 5y ago
It's kinda telling that you need an external service, to figure out where your money goes..
telesilla 5y ago
We have services across a lot of cloud providers, Google and Azure for a variety off things, Digital Ocean for some and the main stuff on AWS. I'd love it if a service such as Vantage could track them all, I can only find solutions for AWS.

sylens 5y ago

I feel like a lot of cloud platform tutorials out there should start with having you create a billing alarm that emails you when the bill crosses a reasonable but higher than expected amount. For basic tutorials, that might be something like $20.

smackeyacky 5y ago
This is a great idea!
c618b9b695c4 5y ago
I would feel even better if there was a Shutdown-Everything at $20 threshold.

audiometry 5y ago

Oh me too. That horrible "mythical beasts" tutorial. I thought I removed it, and then each month for the next two months I'd get nailed for 50? dollars or so. By definition, I don't understand AWS, so figuring out how to turn it off was nearly impossible. AWS "support" didn't exist. Stackoverflow AWS geeks were in high dudgeon that I'd ask the question, "how do i disable this?" and would kill my question. Finally some kind soul did give me the trick to finding the last service to disable. BTW the tutorial is absolutely useless. Just a thousand different incantations to repeat. No real understanding communicated. Felt more like an ad for myriad services. 0/10 would not recommend.

alchermd 5y ago
I understand what you feel completely. I actually wasn't even able to complete the tutorial since the commands given would trigger a permission error one way or another. I got charged $50 as well since I wasn't aware that there's still services running. Such a terrible thing to front as a "Getting Started" guide.
danjac 5y ago
There are consultancies whose entire expertise and premise are advising on AWS billing to companies who already know AWS, so the idea that a newbie should be aware of whatever magical incantation to limit their spend is ludicrous.
- laumars 5y ago
  That’s not entirely fair. While I’m not going to defend the complexity of billing in enterprise cloud services it’s also not really that hard to set an billing alert in CloudWatch and track spend in Cost Explorer. Sure it requires a little bit of AWS knowledge but you shouldn’t really be using enterprise services like AWS (over other more accessible services like Digital Oceans) if you’re not willing to spend the time learning it; and at an individual level it’s very manageable. The reason those consultancy firms exist is because billing scales terribly. Once you’re a business using AWS you’d likely have a multitude of projects running across a multitude of departments which need to be billed to a multitude of different customers and internet cost centres. This all needs to be processed by an internal 3rd party financial system managed by non-technical people who wont even know what AWS stands for let alone what it does and how it works. In those situations the problem of billing becomes exponentially more difficult than a one person hobby project.

Sebb767 5y ago

> Cloud platforms generally don't let users cap the billing, because those overages are good income for them. No. They don't have caps because it's really hard to implement and because the negative press of an app going down because the cloud didn't scale is far worse than any received by surprise bills. Scaling is a large chunk of what you're paying for, after all. This is quite obvious when you look at how lenient AWS is with retracting surprise bills. And the money perspective doesn't make sense, either: AWS is living on customers that have bills in the 5 figure range and up. The occasional 10$ from someone playing around aren't even a drop in the bucket.

kortilla 5y ago
Caps are not hard to implement. That’s a bullshit excuse. If they can bill it they can stop it.
- Sebb767 5y ago
  You sure? Say your app is reaching the cap. What do you do with ongoing costs? Do you block writes? Shut down VMs? Delete stored data? So you might say, simply project the cost (with some magic) and prevent that from going over the limit. So, imagine, your app suddenly experiences a load peak and you need to scale up. However, adding a VM would increase that projection too much. Do you not scale, despite this possibily being a small load peak, and let the app go down? Or do you risk the situation described above? Doesn't matter, you'll get bad press either way. And beyond that, you'd still need to project costs like traffic volume, which can vary extremely. Not to say anything about the technical difficulties of coordinating that billing information across hundreds of services in real time. And even if you do all that, you still get bad press of the likes of "we forgot to remove our payment limit and it killed our app while being on the front page (and our alert did not trigger because we couldn't afford another mail)". There's no way AWS (or any other cloud) is eating all these drawbacks just to have a limit. I bet it's orders of magnitude cheaper to just eat the occasional surprise bill.
  - ed_elliott_asc 5y ago
    I get $150 azure credit a month - my subscription has no credit card attached, when I reach the limit everything shuts down. Azure have the ability to stop everything at a specific limit - they choose not to make it available,

snoman 5y ago

One of the first things you do when learning AWS via A Cloud Guru is setup a billing alarm. I have one that goes off monthly at about how much I expect to spend in a month.

danjac 5y ago

My rule of thumb is to avoid the cloud entirely unless my employer is paying for it. Otherwise, like you said, I'll stick with a fixed amount a month.

hcazz 5y ago

I'm convinced folks who complain about "unexpected recurring small bills on AWS" have never taken the five minutes it takes to learn to using the billing console. It's like asking why the knife you're using keeps cutting you when you put your finger on the sharp end. Learn to use your tools, and they won't surprise you. Learn to track your costs, and you won't have unexplainable recurring bills.

pojzon 5y ago
Yup I also do find those arguments ridiculous. „I cut myself because I dont know how to use knifes, but its the knife fault fpr cutting me”. You can even enable scans for unused respurces that generate costs..
papaf 5y ago
It's like asking why the knife you're using keeps cutting you when you put your finger on the sharp end. Most cloud providers don't have this billing problem and so the analogy breaks. Its more like, why does this knife keep shooting me in the foot?
aiCeivi9 5y ago
> five minutes it takes to learn to using the billing console. I spent hour or two trying to find anything running and didn't find a damn thing. Yet Amazon decided to charge me a buck or two every month for "storage" so I just canceled whole account. I mean, if I can't find what I am paying for when not using it, how am I supposed to understand the bill when I actually have a dozen of instances?
CJefferson 5y ago
That's a good comparison. Have you ever cut yourself with a knife, any time in your life? I certainly have. I've also had a £150 AWS charge I had to pay. In both cases I learnt my lesson. I'm careful not to put my fingers where a knife can cut it, and to not put my bank details where AWS can charge them.
- lordlimecat 5y ago
  Were in a room with 150 engineers, techies, and problem solvers who have been asked whether a cutting implement is overly complex or dangerous. 100 of them have provided an opinion and 99 of the opinions are that it is. Everyone in the room is bleeding. I think it's fair to say that there's an issue with the tool, Stockholm syndrome not withstanding.

joeberon 5y ago

Exact same thing happened to me too