6 ms·

So, I have a personal AWS account, and setting up cost controls seems like a good idea. Let's try it out. "Welcome to AWS Cost Management Since this is your f

by jerf 5y ago

So, I have a personal AWS account, and setting up cost controls seems like a good idea. Let's try it out. "Welcome to AWS Cost Management Since this is your first visit, it will take some time to prepare your cost and usage data. Please check back in 24 hours." My "cost and usage data" is that I have an S3 account costing ~$10 a month containing my cloud backups of my family's high-priority data, for maybe the last 18 months. That's it. I just reloaded in case 24 hours was some sort of pessimistic estimate and they actually had it done in a couple of minutes, but the message persists. WTF. I can set up any of dozens of services in thirty seconds and spend thousands, but it's going to take 24 hours to understand ~$100 in costs over the course of the last year? Someone could read aloud the entire history of the account, every S3 transaction I did, in that amount of time. I can really feel the love here.

StratusBen 5y ago
Not to mention AWS only updates billing data 2-4 times per day. So even if you do have this enabled, on an accrued cost basis you're going to have to wait 6-8 hours to know about it from Cost Explorer.
ineedasername 5y ago
AWS doesn't benefit by providing excellent cost controls and visibility into spending. I'm not saying that neglecting this is a conscious, cynical choice. It may just be that there's simple no incentive to build it in the first place. A self-motivated engineer or team manager is probably not going to say, "I know! Instead of working on the next bit of shiny exciting tech, I'm going to work on cost controls!" Though sure, it could also be deliberate.
- pradn 5y ago
  That's not true at all. Businesses want to reduce risk. Providing cost controls assuages a client's fears. If you're picking between two clouds, cost is a concern, and cost risk is a big factor in that. Would you put your career on the line for a riskier cloud? That's not only cost, but also security, privacy, legal risk, compliance, etc. Clouds spend a great deal of resources to improve all these things, especially for highly-regulated industries which constitute a large part of the potential customer-base: health care, banking, government, polluters.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    And yet AWS has awful cost controls. My interpretation of why they have bad tools in this area might be wrong, but what is the alternative explanation? Incompetence? Certainly they must know it's a concern for a subset of their users. You also may not be cynical enough here: Lookup the Amex tax avoidance strategy that they pitched to companies for a while before a whistle blower tipped off the IRS [0]. Or pretty much any fraud that originates at a high level in a corporation. Companies make risk/reward decisions about doing bad things all of the time. ::ahem Theranos:: [0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/amex-pitched-business-customers-a-tax-break-that-doesnt-add-up-11637587980 https://www.wsj.com/articles/amex-pitched-business-customers...
    - pradn 5y ago
      The likely explanation is that there hasn't been enough pressure put on them to improve these things. They care primarily about large customers, and they already have plenty of ways to resolve cost issues, and usually sign custom contracts. If GCP or Azure has a significantly better answer to this problem, AWS might start caring, but I don't think they do. (I work at GCP.)
      - ineedasername 5y ago
        I think that lines up nicely with my general point that AWS simply doesn't benefit much from putting resources into this area, although some C-level folks might be enticed by shiny marketing materials about "Best in Class Cost Controls & Monitoring" For other option, it does seem like GCP (I don't know much about Azure in this) is a little better in this area. Admittedly, I'm speaking from limited experience playing around with free tiers in both, along with the stream of stories that we hear about AWS. I think it's also fair to point out that cost controls may not have helped much in the example of this particular article: If your account gets hacked, presumably the hacker will also have some access to remove cost controls.
        pradn 5y ago
        Realistically, this wont be a priority until Gartner has a category for this and places all these cloud players on a ranking scale. That sort of thing seems to really move the needle for execs.
- miohtama 5y ago
  If you are a small team and worried about cost, which everyone usual is, the best bet is not to use AWS at all and go with something like DigitalOcean or Hetzner where the pricing tends to come with less surprises. And setting up two-factor authentication is far easier.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    That seems reasonable, although the argument for AWS is usually that it can scale much more easily. If your primary use case is something like EC2, that's probably a non issue when choosing DO unless you have very specific needs for your instances.
- SavantIdiot 5y ago
  > AWS doesn't benefit by providing excellent cost controls and visibility into spending. Except you can create a budget that is based on individual services or usage instances. And you can view each service's cost in zoom-able billing statement. What information are you unable to find about your bill? (NOTE: I'm not an AWS shill. Every time I see AWS billing threads I'm concerned I'm missing something obvious and putting myself and my biz at risk, so I drill down on posts to make sure I know what I'm doing.)
danlugo92 5y ago
www.privacy.com
imwillofficial 5y ago
The billing system runs each night.
- dfrankow 5y ago
  This.
e40 5y ago
Many changes to Google Workspace take up to 24 hours, as well. It always blows me away when I make a tiny change and get that message.
SavantIdiot 5y ago
This is absurd. I just logged into the billing alerts console. I set up a total billing threshold in 90 seconds: https://console.aws.amazon.com/billing/home?#/budgets/overview https://console.aws.amazon.com/billing/home?#/budgets/overvi... What on earth are you getting at?
- prirun 5y ago
  You can setup whatever alert threshold you want, but it doesn't stop charges from accruing. What is needed is a way to say "I only expect charges of $10 or less per month. If charges go over that, disable the account until I can get in there and find out what is happening."
  - SavantIdiot 5y ago
    That can also be done. I can shut down any specific or cluster of EC2 instances if any one exceeds a $ limit, or all of them. The resolution is up to me and I immediately stop getting charged. If I have lost ROOT access, as the OP did, nothing can save me: all alerts and thresholds can be shut off by the hacker. Just like any other system.
    - prirun 5y ago
      I saw that part about setting up quotas and actions when budgets are exceeded. I did setup an email alert, but the quota thing was extremely complex. There was a list of service quotas a mile long just under the EC2 section. Some of them were automatically set by AWS, most of them were zero. This is clearly aimed at companies with a huge AWS infrastructure investment and the staff to manage it, not some schmuck individual like myself that just wants to not get a $45K bill.
      - SavantIdiot 5y ago
        Again, the $45K was due to a hack of root credentials. Not AWS being shady. If anyone got access to root on your machine you'd be screwed. If a total shutdown when aggregate monthly budget is triggered is insufficient, and fine-grained quotas are too complex, you probably shouldn't be in the cloud because Azure and Google are equally complex. Or do you like another cloud-computer service better than AWS because their budgeting quota systems are better? Please share, I'd like to know what you use.

by jerf 5y ago

StratusBen 5y ago

Not to mention AWS only updates billing data 2-4 times per day. So even if you do have this enabled, on an accrued cost basis you're going to have to wait 6-8 hours to know about it from Cost Explorer.

ineedasername 5y ago

AWS doesn't benefit by providing excellent cost controls and visibility into spending. I'm not saying that neglecting this is a conscious, cynical choice. It may just be that there's simple no incentive to build it in the first place. A self-motivated engineer or team manager is probably not going to say, "I know! Instead of working on the next bit of shiny exciting tech, I'm going to work on cost controls!" Though sure, it could also be deliberate.

pradn 5y ago
That's not true at all. Businesses want to reduce risk. Providing cost controls assuages a client's fears. If you're picking between two clouds, cost is a concern, and cost risk is a big factor in that. Would you put your career on the line for a riskier cloud? That's not only cost, but also security, privacy, legal risk, compliance, etc. Clouds spend a great deal of resources to improve all these things, especially for highly-regulated industries which constitute a large part of the potential customer-base: health care, banking, government, polluters.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  And yet AWS has awful cost controls. My interpretation of why they have bad tools in this area might be wrong, but what is the alternative explanation? Incompetence? Certainly they must know it's a concern for a subset of their users. You also may not be cynical enough here: Lookup the Amex tax avoidance strategy that they pitched to companies for a while before a whistle blower tipped off the IRS [0]. Or pretty much any fraud that originates at a high level in a corporation. Companies make risk/reward decisions about doing bad things all of the time. ::ahem Theranos:: [0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/amex-pitched-business-customers-a-tax-break-that-doesnt-add-up-11637587980 https://www.wsj.com/articles/amex-pitched-business-customers...
  - pradn 5y ago
    The likely explanation is that there hasn't been enough pressure put on them to improve these things. They care primarily about large customers, and they already have plenty of ways to resolve cost issues, and usually sign custom contracts. If GCP or Azure has a significantly better answer to this problem, AWS might start caring, but I don't think they do. (I work at GCP.)
    - ineedasername 5y ago
      I think that lines up nicely with my general point that AWS simply doesn't benefit much from putting resources into this area, although some C-level folks might be enticed by shiny marketing materials about "Best in Class Cost Controls & Monitoring" For other option, it does seem like GCP (I don't know much about Azure in this) is a little better in this area. Admittedly, I'm speaking from limited experience playing around with free tiers in both, along with the stream of stories that we hear about AWS. I think it's also fair to point out that cost controls may not have helped much in the example of this particular article: If your account gets hacked, presumably the hacker will also have some access to remove cost controls.
      - pradn 5y ago
        Realistically, this wont be a priority until Gartner has a category for this and places all these cloud players on a ranking scale. That sort of thing seems to really move the needle for execs.
miohtama 5y ago
If you are a small team and worried about cost, which everyone usual is, the best bet is not to use AWS at all and go with something like DigitalOcean or Hetzner where the pricing tends to come with less surprises. And setting up two-factor authentication is far easier.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  That seems reasonable, although the argument for AWS is usually that it can scale much more easily. If your primary use case is something like EC2, that's probably a non issue when choosing DO unless you have very specific needs for your instances.
SavantIdiot 5y ago
> AWS doesn't benefit by providing excellent cost controls and visibility into spending. Except you can create a budget that is based on individual services or usage instances. And you can view each service's cost in zoom-able billing statement. What information are you unable to find about your bill? (NOTE: I'm not an AWS shill. Every time I see AWS billing threads I'm concerned I'm missing something obvious and putting myself and my biz at risk, so I drill down on posts to make sure I know what I'm doing.)

danlugo92 5y ago

www.privacy.com

imwillofficial 5y ago

The billing system runs each night.

dfrankow 5y ago
This.

e40 5y ago

Many changes to Google Workspace take up to 24 hours, as well. It always blows me away when I make a tiny change and get that message.

SavantIdiot 5y ago

This is absurd. I just logged into the billing alerts console. I set up a total billing threshold in 90 seconds: https://console.aws.amazon.com/billing/home?#/budgets/overview https://console.aws.amazon.com/billing/home?#/budgets/overvi... What on earth are you getting at?

prirun 5y ago
You can setup whatever alert threshold you want, but it doesn't stop charges from accruing. What is needed is a way to say "I only expect charges of $10 or less per month. If charges go over that, disable the account until I can get in there and find out what is happening."
- SavantIdiot 5y ago
  That can also be done. I can shut down any specific or cluster of EC2 instances if any one exceeds a $ limit, or all of them. The resolution is up to me and I immediately stop getting charged. If I have lost ROOT access, as the OP did, nothing can save me: all alerts and thresholds can be shut off by the hacker. Just like any other system.
  - prirun 5y ago
    I saw that part about setting up quotas and actions when budgets are exceeded. I did setup an email alert, but the quota thing was extremely complex. There was a list of service quotas a mile long just under the EC2 section. Some of them were automatically set by AWS, most of them were zero. This is clearly aimed at companies with a huge AWS infrastructure investment and the staff to manage it, not some schmuck individual like myself that just wants to not get a $45K bill.
    - SavantIdiot 5y ago
      Again, the $45K was due to a hack of root credentials. Not AWS being shady. If anyone got access to root on your machine you'd be screwed. If a total shutdown when aggregate monthly budget is triggered is insufficient, and fine-grained quotas are too complex, you probably shouldn't be in the cloud because Azure and Google are equally complex. Or do you like another cloud-computer service better than AWS because their budgeting quota systems are better? Please share, I'd like to know what you use.