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How are their systems designed to make controlling cost difficult? I've found it exceptionally easy to find places where things are suboptimal and it's always q

by booi 4y ago

How are their systems designed to make controlling cost difficult? I've found it exceptionally easy to find places where things are suboptimal and it's always quite clear to me how much something will cost before I do it.

vorpalhex 4y ago
I had an engineer run up a $5k sagemaker bill because they didn't realize "stopped" was different from "terminated". You also can't set a max billing limit (or a soft limit).
- Spivak 4y ago
  If you rent a car and it’s still in your possession but turned off they don’t stop charging you.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    Well luckily it's very obvious when I still have a car in my driveway. It's not obvious that a script got caught in a loop and decided to write up a $5000 bill overnight.
    - zdragnar 4y ago
      The previous post didn't say a script got caught in a loop overnight, it was that the engineer didn't understand the difference between stopped and terminated. Even so, I don't think it is AWS's fault that buggy code was left to run unattended overnight in the example you give.
      - pixl97 4y ago
        Right, it's not AWS's fault that buggy code ran overnight. It is absolutely 100% Amazon's decision to give you little to no tooling to prevent this in many scenarios other than going to their billing department and beg for a correction. I do not use any service that can proceed to bankrupt me for personal use for what could be considered a normal use case. At work I'd pass the issue off to my manager who'd pass it off to a rep and deal with it that way, but there is no way I want to take that responsibility on myself to correct.
        whatshisface 4y ago
        AWS has a reasonable defense for charging for that - it costs them money whether you meant to run it or not.
        zdragnar 4y ago
        To be fair, it'd be fantastic if there were an option to put an automatic hard stop on services once a billing threshold is reached. I seem to recall AWS explaining how to rube-goldberg something together yourself with lambdas and alerts, but if they're capable of telling me to how cobble together the feature myself with their services, surely they could offer it as a turnkey option. That aside, I also understand that they can't actually put a hard cap, since usage is measured after the fact occurs, and by the time the system triggers a halt, more usage has likely occurred. At the very least, I'd be fine with paying $X + 1 when I set an auto-shutdown threshold to $X if that was what they had to do to implement it. Outside of that quibble, I find the other complaints to be less reasonable.
  - amluto 4y ago
    If I rent a car, I see the pricing up front. And the pricing does not depend on how often I open the trunk or how far I turn the steering wheel.
    - ctvo 4y ago
      You do see up front pricing. Please look harder, it’s there for every dimension they charge you for (instance type, network traffic, disk size, etc.). Back to your analogy. You get charge for these other dimensions that vary when you rent a car: - make, model - miles driven - toll usage - driver’s age - duration of rental The more accurate analogy here for the GP is the person returned a rental car to the wrong lot and was charged additional days until they discovered their error.
cratermoon 4y ago
Just an example: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/an-aws-free-tier-bill-shock-your-next-steps/ https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/an-aws-free-tier-bill-sho...

by booi 4y ago

vorpalhex 4y ago

I had an engineer run up a $5k sagemaker bill because they didn't realize "stopped" was different from "terminated". You also can't set a max billing limit (or a soft limit).

Spivak 4y ago
If you rent a car and it’s still in your possession but turned off they don’t stop charging you.
- pixl97 4y ago
  Well luckily it's very obvious when I still have a car in my driveway. It's not obvious that a script got caught in a loop and decided to write up a $5000 bill overnight.
  - zdragnar 4y ago
    The previous post didn't say a script got caught in a loop overnight, it was that the engineer didn't understand the difference between stopped and terminated. Even so, I don't think it is AWS's fault that buggy code was left to run unattended overnight in the example you give.
    - pixl97 4y ago
      Right, it's not AWS's fault that buggy code ran overnight. It is absolutely 100% Amazon's decision to give you little to no tooling to prevent this in many scenarios other than going to their billing department and beg for a correction. I do not use any service that can proceed to bankrupt me for personal use for what could be considered a normal use case. At work I'd pass the issue off to my manager who'd pass it off to a rep and deal with it that way, but there is no way I want to take that responsibility on myself to correct.
      - whatshisface 4y ago
        AWS has a reasonable defense for charging for that - it costs them money whether you meant to run it or not.
        zdragnar 4y ago
        To be fair, it'd be fantastic if there were an option to put an automatic hard stop on services once a billing threshold is reached. I seem to recall AWS explaining how to rube-goldberg something together yourself with lambdas and alerts, but if they're capable of telling me to how cobble together the feature myself with their services, surely they could offer it as a turnkey option. That aside, I also understand that they can't actually put a hard cap, since usage is measured after the fact occurs, and by the time the system triggers a halt, more usage has likely occurred. At the very least, I'd be fine with paying $X + 1 when I set an auto-shutdown threshold to $X if that was what they had to do to implement it. Outside of that quibble, I find the other complaints to be less reasonable.
- amluto 4y ago
  If I rent a car, I see the pricing up front. And the pricing does not depend on how often I open the trunk or how far I turn the steering wheel.
  - ctvo 4y ago
    You do see up front pricing. Please look harder, it’s there for every dimension they charge you for (instance type, network traffic, disk size, etc.). Back to your analogy. You get charge for these other dimensions that vary when you rent a car: - make, model - miles driven - toll usage - driver’s age - duration of rental The more accurate analogy here for the GP is the person returned a rental car to the wrong lot and was charged additional days until they discovered their error.

cratermoon 4y ago

Just an example: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/an-aws-free-tier-bill-shock-your-next-steps/ https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/an-aws-free-tier-bill-sho...