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It's funny that even Hetzner can do that and AWS can't. Shows that there's no interest from AWS to prevent these things from happening.

by dx034 5y ago

bencollier49 5y ago
IMO this is something which ought to be written into law. It'd be easy to implement a kill switch, and would actually encourage innovation, as people would feel more empowered to experiment with the technology.
- wccrawford 5y ago
  Absolutely, and I would make it a bit broader: Anything that automatically charges a client a variable amount should have a maximum-spend limit that the client can set, and it should default to a reasonable number based on the client's expected usage. In fact, you could even just change that to any auto-billing service or product and the default for constant-charge services would simply be the amount of the constant charge.
  - cure 5y ago
    Yes. And the law would simply state that the customer may not be billed more than that maximum for the service period. Up to the business to restrict their use of the service, if they want to. If it's really so 'complicated' that that part can't be done, well, I'm sure it would suddenly become a business priority to cut off use when the limit is hit, if the business can't charge for it.
danparsonson 5y ago
*won't
Nextgrid 5y ago
To be fair, Hetzner doesn't nickel & dime you on everything. Some things are legitimately very difficult to meter in a real-time way with adequate performance. Imagine if the S3 server had to do a DB query to lookup your account balance & limit on every HTTP request. That'll completely kill performance and availability (what if the billing DB is down? Should that DB now be replicated across all regions? etc). The reason a lot of cloud alerts and metrics lag is because billing is done asynchronously by parsing logs way after the actual usage occurred. Of course, the real solution here is to just not bill for things you can't easily measure & limit especially when those things are super expensive, but cloud providers' C-suites have to eat & pay their bills somehow.

It's funny that even Hetzner can do that and AWS can't. Shows that there's no interest from AWS to prevent these things from happening.

by dx034 5y ago

It's funny that even Hetzner can do that and AWS can't. Shows that there's no interest from AWS to prevent these things from happening.

bencollier49 5y ago

IMO this is something which ought to be written into law. It'd be easy to implement a kill switch, and would actually encourage innovation, as people would feel more empowered to experiment with the technology.

wccrawford 5y ago
Absolutely, and I would make it a bit broader: Anything that automatically charges a client a variable amount should have a maximum-spend limit that the client can set, and it should default to a reasonable number based on the client's expected usage. In fact, you could even just change that to any auto-billing service or product and the default for constant-charge services would simply be the amount of the constant charge.
- cure 5y ago
  Yes. And the law would simply state that the customer may not be billed more than that maximum for the service period. Up to the business to restrict their use of the service, if they want to. If it's really so 'complicated' that that part can't be done, well, I'm sure it would suddenly become a business priority to cut off use when the limit is hit, if the business can't charge for it.

danparsonson 5y ago

*won't

Nextgrid 5y ago

To be fair, Hetzner doesn't nickel & dime you on everything. Some things are legitimately very difficult to meter in a real-time way with adequate performance. Imagine if the S3 server had to do a DB query to lookup your account balance & limit on every HTTP request. That'll completely kill performance and availability (what if the billing DB is down? Should that DB now be replicated across all regions? etc). The reason a lot of cloud alerts and metrics lag is because billing is done asynchronously by parsing logs way after the actual usage occurred. Of course, the real solution here is to just not bill for things you can't easily measure & limit especially when those things are super expensive, but cloud providers' C-suites have to eat & pay their bills somehow.