4 ms·

The cloud isn't something I'd ever use my private credit card on, there are just too many ways to screw it up if you're not very careful and know what you're do

The cloud isn't something I'd ever use my private credit card on, there are just too many ways to screw it up if you're not very careful and know what you're doing. I don't think I would have hit this particular issue, but that is mainly because I've read a bunch of stories of this kind and BigQuery is one of the things I associate with "can get very expensive very quickly" based on those. I know the explanations and justifications for it, but for personal use a service where I can't put a hard limit on usage is simply not acceptable for me. It's just not worth the risk.

bugbuddy 3y ago
There is a really easy fix to this problem: setting billing limits. This can be done with almost all cloud providers and it takes almost no time. These incidents just show a lack of professionalism on the part of the person incurring the costs. I personally did on the first day I setup a cloud computing account when I was still doing my BS in college. It is not that hard folks. Set the billing limits.
- blibble 3y ago
  > This can be done with almost all cloud providers and it takes almost no time. well, other than the three market leaders (GCP, AWS and Azure)
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - bugbuddy 3y ago
    True these giants make their own lives easier and don’t implement much billing controls into the infrastructure. It is your money so it is your responsibility to protect it. Use billing alerts, hacks, and research things carefully before jumping with both feet.
    - joepie91_ 3y ago
      > It is your money so it is your responsibility to protect it. This is victim blaming.
      - dekhn 3y ago
        Is victim blaming inherently wrong? What about situations where the victim caused their own victimization?
- fabian2k 3y ago
  The main reason I'd use a personal account for one of the big cloud providers would be to learn stuff. At that point a lack of professionalism is kinda expected, because learning stuff is the whole point. And my understanding is that almost none of the way of setting limits are actual hard limits, but only alerts and some hacked-together emergency abort scripts. Correct me if I'm wrong, but can you actually limit the cost robustly for services that spend that much money in an hour or so? Doesn't help much if I get an email about it and read it two hours afterwards.
  - bugbuddy 3y ago
    I understand the down votes but I would still say that being aware of the rough estimate costs of each service you are using is an integral part of an engineer’s job. After all, we care a lot about CPU cycles and those are measured in femto dollars.
    - joepie91_ 3y ago
      You can call someone an 'engineer' with the associated responsibilities when they are getting paid for what they are doing like an engineer, in a setting that provides them with the protections of an engineer. Until that point, they are just an individual who got screwed by disguised billing practices.
    - fabian2k 3y ago
      That's not sufficient, you also must not make mistakes. I have very limited cloud experience, but I did make a mistake that lead to a rather slow but constant cost. The amount was small enough to not be relevant in a professional context, but the memorable part was that I could not pinpoint the source easily with the AWS tools and my limited understanding of them. The categories and labels were too broad, and it took a bit until I figured out what went wrong. There are certainly better tools to investigate this, but I didn't know them. In the end it was simply luck that the mistake still fell into an area of insignificant amounts of money, but it could have easily been significantly more if a few parameters had been different for the same mistake
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  > It is not that hard folks. Set the billing limits. Excellent idea. Please describe how to create an account on AWS or GCP that is not allowed to spend more than $100/mo. Since it is "a really easy fix" and "takes almost no time" it should be easy to explain, right?
  - kstrauser 3y ago
    https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/hands-on/control-your-costs-free-tier-budgets/ https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/hands-on/control-your... tells you how to set up a budget, with notifications when you're getting close. That's probably enough for 99% of people, and if you're highly motivated, you could make that trigger an SNS notification that trips a circuit breaker.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
      No, that's really not good enough. I don't want to need to be "highly motivated" in order to set a limit, I want to say this thing cannot use more than this many dollars each month, no conditions no exceptions no questions. If I make a fun little side project and it hits the front page of HN, I don't want to quibble about whether I cut it off in time or some hacked together little script turns things off correctly, I want it capped.
  - nonfamous 3y ago
    You can in Azure, easily. New Azure free accounts (which most learners start with) have spending limits enabled by default. https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/cost-management-billing/manage/spending-limit https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/cost-management-billing/ma...
    - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
      So honestly if that's true I might have to try Azure, thanks. However, when the claim was "This can be done with almost all cloud providers" I feel comfortable wanting an answer for the other two of the big three.
    - 3y ago
blibble 3y ago
if your country lets you set up and maintain an LLC easily this can be a reasonable way to manage the risk a catastrophic mistake might result in the company going bust and all the pain associated with that but shouldn't lose you your home (assuming you acted properly, the project using the cloud provider has to be in the aims of the company, etc etc etc) speak to a lawyer
- questionacount 3y ago
  Is there a guide or someone I should talk to about how to do this? I’ve long wondered what I can do with an LLC to protect me from debts like this but I don’t know how to get more information about it. Particularly as I’d be the sole owner I don’t really understand what the llc does/doesn’t do. If you had just 1000$ (and made a few hundred a year) is it worth doing?
  - abeyer 3y ago
    Read your sibling comment... basically doing this solely for the purpose of trying to avoid debt won't work unless the creditor is just too lazy to pursue it.
    - blibble 3y ago
      the word "solely" is doing a lot of work there if you're experimenting with side project that you think has potential commercial value then this is why limited liability as a concept was invented (as always, speak to lawyer)
      - abeyer 3y ago
        Of course. If you have a viable business and the debt is related to that, that's exactly what the corporate veil is for. If you just want to hedge your bets on your personal GCP bill for hobby stuff, not so much.
  - blibble 3y ago
    speak to a lawyer obviously the advice will cost you but may be the best couple of hundred bucks you ever spent it's not magic though, you do have to conduct yourself properly as a company (be that non-profit or otherwise)
httparchive 3y ago
It wasn't personal use, for business - but I'm bootstrapping a startup, so it's a very tough lesson to learn.

bugbuddy 3y ago

There is a really easy fix to this problem: setting billing limits. This can be done with almost all cloud providers and it takes almost no time. These incidents just show a lack of professionalism on the part of the person incurring the costs. I personally did on the first day I setup a cloud computing account when I was still doing my BS in college. It is not that hard folks. Set the billing limits.

blibble 3y ago
> This can be done with almost all cloud providers and it takes almost no time. well, other than the three market leaders (GCP, AWS and Azure)
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- bugbuddy 3y ago
  True these giants make their own lives easier and don’t implement much billing controls into the infrastructure. It is your money so it is your responsibility to protect it. Use billing alerts, hacks, and research things carefully before jumping with both feet.
  - joepie91_ 3y ago
    > It is your money so it is your responsibility to protect it. This is victim blaming.
    - dekhn 3y ago
      Is victim blaming inherently wrong? What about situations where the victim caused their own victimization?
fabian2k 3y ago
The main reason I'd use a personal account for one of the big cloud providers would be to learn stuff. At that point a lack of professionalism is kinda expected, because learning stuff is the whole point. And my understanding is that almost none of the way of setting limits are actual hard limits, but only alerts and some hacked-together emergency abort scripts. Correct me if I'm wrong, but can you actually limit the cost robustly for services that spend that much money in an hour or so? Doesn't help much if I get an email about it and read it two hours afterwards.
- bugbuddy 3y ago
  I understand the down votes but I would still say that being aware of the rough estimate costs of each service you are using is an integral part of an engineer’s job. After all, we care a lot about CPU cycles and those are measured in femto dollars.
  - joepie91_ 3y ago
    You can call someone an 'engineer' with the associated responsibilities when they are getting paid for what they are doing like an engineer, in a setting that provides them with the protections of an engineer. Until that point, they are just an individual who got screwed by disguised billing practices.
  - fabian2k 3y ago
    That's not sufficient, you also must not make mistakes. I have very limited cloud experience, but I did make a mistake that lead to a rather slow but constant cost. The amount was small enough to not be relevant in a professional context, but the memorable part was that I could not pinpoint the source easily with the AWS tools and my limited understanding of them. The categories and labels were too broad, and it took a bit until I figured out what went wrong. There are certainly better tools to investigate this, but I didn't know them. In the end it was simply luck that the mistake still fell into an area of insignificant amounts of money, but it could have easily been significantly more if a few parameters had been different for the same mistake
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
> It is not that hard folks. Set the billing limits. Excellent idea. Please describe how to create an account on AWS or GCP that is not allowed to spend more than $100/mo. Since it is "a really easy fix" and "takes almost no time" it should be easy to explain, right?
- kstrauser 3y ago
  https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/hands-on/control-your-costs-free-tier-budgets/ https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/hands-on/control-your... tells you how to set up a budget, with notifications when you're getting close. That's probably enough for 99% of people, and if you're highly motivated, you could make that trigger an SNS notification that trips a circuit breaker.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    No, that's really not good enough. I don't want to need to be "highly motivated" in order to set a limit, I want to say this thing cannot use more than this many dollars each month, no conditions no exceptions no questions. If I make a fun little side project and it hits the front page of HN, I don't want to quibble about whether I cut it off in time or some hacked together little script turns things off correctly, I want it capped.
- nonfamous 3y ago
  You can in Azure, easily. New Azure free accounts (which most learners start with) have spending limits enabled by default. https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/cost-management-billing/manage/spending-limit https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/cost-management-billing/ma...
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    So honestly if that's true I might have to try Azure, thanks. However, when the claim was "This can be done with almost all cloud providers" I feel comfortable wanting an answer for the other two of the big three.
  - 3y ago

blibble 3y ago

if your country lets you set up and maintain an LLC easily this can be a reasonable way to manage the risk a catastrophic mistake might result in the company going bust and all the pain associated with that but shouldn't lose you your home (assuming you acted properly, the project using the cloud provider has to be in the aims of the company, etc etc etc) speak to a lawyer

questionacount 3y ago
Is there a guide or someone I should talk to about how to do this? I’ve long wondered what I can do with an LLC to protect me from debts like this but I don’t know how to get more information about it. Particularly as I’d be the sole owner I don’t really understand what the llc does/doesn’t do. If you had just 1000$ (and made a few hundred a year) is it worth doing?
- abeyer 3y ago
  Read your sibling comment... basically doing this solely for the purpose of trying to avoid debt won't work unless the creditor is just too lazy to pursue it.
  - blibble 3y ago
    the word "solely" is doing a lot of work there if you're experimenting with side project that you think has potential commercial value then this is why limited liability as a concept was invented (as always, speak to lawyer)
    - abeyer 3y ago
      Of course. If you have a viable business and the debt is related to that, that's exactly what the corporate veil is for. If you just want to hedge your bets on your personal GCP bill for hobby stuff, not so much.
- blibble 3y ago
  speak to a lawyer obviously the advice will cost you but may be the best couple of hundred bucks you ever spent it's not magic though, you do have to conduct yourself properly as a company (be that non-profit or otherwise)

httparchive 3y ago

It wasn't personal use, for business - but I'm bootstrapping a startup, so it's a very tough lesson to learn.