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I’ve recently had an issue where GCP keeps shutting down my e2.micro because they think I’m crypto mining. I have no idea what I’m doing to trigger it, and I do

I’ve recently had an issue where GCP keeps shutting down my e2.micro because they think I’m crypto mining. I have no idea what I’m doing to trigger it, and I don’t blame them for not sharing their secret anti fraud heuristics, but it’s a freakin e2.micro. They think I’m mining on that?!

missingdays 3y ago
Why would they care if you mine crypto? You pay for resource usage, you use resources
- professorsnep 3y ago
  GCE allows one e2.micro instance in their free tier
- herdrick 3y ago
  Providers often just ban all crypto mining. I think it might be because of pressure from authorities fighting money laundering.
  - Sebguer 3y ago
    No, it's because it's an extraordinarily common fraud vector, and causes noisy neighbor problem because despite GP's remark about 'paying for resource usage', cloud providers don't actually anticipate anyone using 100% of CPU 24/7/365. And the folks who really are crypto mining are never going to pay their monthly invoice. Source: Worked at a cloud infra provider that struggled deeply with this problem.
    - jmaker 3y ago
      So you pay expecting full utilization but are expected to utilize on a fair-share basis only? And if I run my Monte Carlo simulation, which can take a week to complete, my instance is flagged for alleged crypto mining?
      - Sebguer 3y ago
        This generally depends on the tier of service you're paying for. Every infra provider offers tiers that provide dedicated resources. AWS handles this via CPU credits, other providers are less sophisticated. Generally speaking you're not going to get banned unless you spin up max quotas and have other signals for fraud, such as zero payment history, connecting from regions with high fraud rates, etc. More often the provider will just limit your resources - either openly, like AWS does, or more subtly.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
      > despite GP's remark about 'paying for resource usage', cloud providers don't actually anticipate anyone using 100% of CPU 24/7/365 Unless that's exposed to the customer (AWS burstable instances are actually okay IMO), that sounds like the cloud provider committing fraud and hoping nobody calls their bluff.
      - Sebguer 3y ago
        You don't know what the word fraud means, and I recommend reading these crazy things called 'terms of service'.
        yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
        > The crime of stealing or otherwise illegally obtaining money by use of deception tactics. > Any act of deception carried out for the purpose of unfair, undeserved and/or unlawful gain. (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fraud#Noun https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fraud#Noun) Is the cloud provider getting money off of this arrangement? => Yes, obviously they're getting paid here. Is the cloud provider getting that money as a result of deception? => Yes, by selling ex. the use of 1 CPU core when they actually have no intention of letting you use that core. Now, I'll grant that in an actual legal case it might well be possible to get away with this by burying it in the ToS, but this is HN, not a court room, so I'm comfortable setting the bar at "would most actual users expect that to happen based on marketing?", conclude that no, most users would consider that surprising even if there's something buried in the ToS claiming that it's allowed, and call a spade a spade.
        parpfish 3y ago
        the problem is that the terms of service say "don't mine crypto", and I'm not. they've set up an imperfect detection mechanism and I'm one of the false positives but have no meaningful way to prove my innocence. the worst part is that there's somebody in a GCP office somewhere that might secretly believe that I'm actually a cryptobro. shudder
        sigstoat 3y ago
- TX81Z 3y ago
  Maybe they’re waiting to finish the big roll out of NFT on YouTube!
- reaperman 3y ago
  It's a very convenient way to convert identity theft into cash. A huge amount of cloud crypto mining is paid for in fraudulent credit cards. Detecting and banning crypto mining greatly reduces % of fraudulent transactions as these attackers will move on to greener pastures. They can also use an absolutely incredible amount of resources, because it's not their money. Two hundred A100 GPU's for a week? Sure, why not?
- aseipp 3y ago
  Fraud vector. It's very easy to turn compute into dollars if the compute is free or stolen. Cloud compute is very cost ineffective for something like coin mining, so any actual legitimate miners on any chain are going to just run everything in-house anyway. In the end, that means the people left in that pool predominantly fall into two groups: A) people using stolen credit cards B) accounts that had hacked credentials or leaked API keys running rampant. Whatever heuristics cloud providers tend to use to discover and "remediate" such behavior is a totally different thing (e.g. obliterating an established account when an API key might have gotten leaked and a few GPUs let loose is a little overboard), but if I was offering a similar compute service, and its sole purpose wasn't just coin mining, I'd almost certainly ban it as well for similar reasons.
- cavisne 3y ago
  Its impossible to profitably mine crypto on a public cloud so anyone doing it is either stupid, or has no intention of paying (much more common!). Historically GCP/GAE has had a more generous free tier without credit card requirements, so they've always been a bit stricter on this than the other clouds.
Nathanba 3y ago
The cloud feels like a casino designed to fleece you. No way to set limits + no way to check your limit (via API). The price calculators are as complex as they can possibly be, just spin the wheel and hope for the best I guess. Price estimations for my instance in my month vary wildly from cents to over 1€. I just imagine what would happen if I actually spent money there and price estimations are 100€ per month when I check in the morning and then the next day for whatever reason x10 higher. Currently my supposedly free micro instance on GCP is projected to costing 1.50€ per month. Obviously I'm very greatful for free computing, that's very nice. It's actually the main reason I'm even entertaining using the cloud for things and bothering to try things out. My complaint isn't about that, it's about the fact that their stated cost isn't the actual cost. It does seem to actually cost something. No, not network costs. It says "E2 instance core" and "E2 instance ram". It will be very interesting to see whether I get an explanation for this and whether they will take the money. In the first month they already took a few cents for the 2-3 days I ran it. I don't know if irony is the right word but the GCP cost only has to go slightly higher and I can already switch off the cloud to a standard VM somewhere to have cheaper compute. Imagine that, I'm not a 100k/month spender like some here, I'm a free user and it's already almost cheaper for me to switch off the cloud.
- bombcar 3y ago
  It might be worth trying that “perpetual free instance” that Oracle cloud offers. Apparently it’s actually free.
- kyrra 3y ago
  I'd assume it's bandwidth costs.
sidcool 3y ago
Why does GCP care if you are crypto mining as long as you are paying them for the CPU/GPU, memory, bandwidth and storage?

missingdays 3y ago

Why would they care if you mine crypto? You pay for resource usage, you use resources

professorsnep 3y ago
GCE allows one e2.micro instance in their free tier
herdrick 3y ago
Providers often just ban all crypto mining. I think it might be because of pressure from authorities fighting money laundering.
- Sebguer 3y ago
  No, it's because it's an extraordinarily common fraud vector, and causes noisy neighbor problem because despite GP's remark about 'paying for resource usage', cloud providers don't actually anticipate anyone using 100% of CPU 24/7/365. And the folks who really are crypto mining are never going to pay their monthly invoice. Source: Worked at a cloud infra provider that struggled deeply with this problem.
  - jmaker 3y ago
    So you pay expecting full utilization but are expected to utilize on a fair-share basis only? And if I run my Monte Carlo simulation, which can take a week to complete, my instance is flagged for alleged crypto mining?
    - Sebguer 3y ago
      This generally depends on the tier of service you're paying for. Every infra provider offers tiers that provide dedicated resources. AWS handles this via CPU credits, other providers are less sophisticated. Generally speaking you're not going to get banned unless you spin up max quotas and have other signals for fraud, such as zero payment history, connecting from regions with high fraud rates, etc. More often the provider will just limit your resources - either openly, like AWS does, or more subtly.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    > despite GP's remark about 'paying for resource usage', cloud providers don't actually anticipate anyone using 100% of CPU 24/7/365 Unless that's exposed to the customer (AWS burstable instances are actually okay IMO), that sounds like the cloud provider committing fraud and hoping nobody calls their bluff.
    - Sebguer 3y ago
      You don't know what the word fraud means, and I recommend reading these crazy things called 'terms of service'.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
        > The crime of stealing or otherwise illegally obtaining money by use of deception tactics. > Any act of deception carried out for the purpose of unfair, undeserved and/or unlawful gain. (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fraud#Noun https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fraud#Noun) Is the cloud provider getting money off of this arrangement? => Yes, obviously they're getting paid here. Is the cloud provider getting that money as a result of deception? => Yes, by selling ex. the use of 1 CPU core when they actually have no intention of letting you use that core. Now, I'll grant that in an actual legal case it might well be possible to get away with this by burying it in the ToS, but this is HN, not a court room, so I'm comfortable setting the bar at "would most actual users expect that to happen based on marketing?", conclude that no, most users would consider that surprising even if there's something buried in the ToS claiming that it's allowed, and call a spade a spade.
      - parpfish 3y ago
        the problem is that the terms of service say "don't mine crypto", and I'm not. they've set up an imperfect detection mechanism and I'm one of the false positives but have no meaningful way to prove my innocence. the worst part is that there's somebody in a GCP office somewhere that might secretly believe that I'm actually a cryptobro. shudder
        sigstoat 3y ago
TX81Z 3y ago
Maybe they’re waiting to finish the big roll out of NFT on YouTube!
reaperman 3y ago
It's a very convenient way to convert identity theft into cash. A huge amount of cloud crypto mining is paid for in fraudulent credit cards. Detecting and banning crypto mining greatly reduces % of fraudulent transactions as these attackers will move on to greener pastures. They can also use an absolutely incredible amount of resources, because it's not their money. Two hundred A100 GPU's for a week? Sure, why not?
aseipp 3y ago
Fraud vector. It's very easy to turn compute into dollars if the compute is free or stolen. Cloud compute is very cost ineffective for something like coin mining, so any actual legitimate miners on any chain are going to just run everything in-house anyway. In the end, that means the people left in that pool predominantly fall into two groups: A) people using stolen credit cards B) accounts that had hacked credentials or leaked API keys running rampant. Whatever heuristics cloud providers tend to use to discover and "remediate" such behavior is a totally different thing (e.g. obliterating an established account when an API key might have gotten leaked and a few GPUs let loose is a little overboard), but if I was offering a similar compute service, and its sole purpose wasn't just coin mining, I'd almost certainly ban it as well for similar reasons.
cavisne 3y ago
Its impossible to profitably mine crypto on a public cloud so anyone doing it is either stupid, or has no intention of paying (much more common!). Historically GCP/GAE has had a more generous free tier without credit card requirements, so they've always been a bit stricter on this than the other clouds.

Nathanba 3y ago

The cloud feels like a casino designed to fleece you. No way to set limits + no way to check your limit (via API). The price calculators are as complex as they can possibly be, just spin the wheel and hope for the best I guess. Price estimations for my instance in my month vary wildly from cents to over 1€. I just imagine what would happen if I actually spent money there and price estimations are 100€ per month when I check in the morning and then the next day for whatever reason x10 higher. Currently my supposedly free micro instance on GCP is projected to costing 1.50€ per month. Obviously I'm very greatful for free computing, that's very nice. It's actually the main reason I'm even entertaining using the cloud for things and bothering to try things out. My complaint isn't about that, it's about the fact that their stated cost isn't the actual cost. It does seem to actually cost something. No, not network costs. It says "E2 instance core" and "E2 instance ram". It will be very interesting to see whether I get an explanation for this and whether they will take the money. In the first month they already took a few cents for the 2-3 days I ran it. I don't know if irony is the right word but the GCP cost only has to go slightly higher and I can already switch off the cloud to a standard VM somewhere to have cheaper compute. Imagine that, I'm not a 100k/month spender like some here, I'm a free user and it's already almost cheaper for me to switch off the cloud.

bombcar 3y ago
It might be worth trying that “perpetual free instance” that Oracle cloud offers. Apparently it’s actually free.
kyrra 3y ago
I'd assume it's bandwidth costs.

sidcool 3y ago

Why does GCP care if you are crypto mining as long as you are paying them for the CPU/GPU, memory, bandwidth and storage?