3 ms·

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.

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.

3 ms·

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.

by zdragnar 4y ago

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.