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Depends on various factors and of course the amount of money in question. I've had AWS approve a refund for a rather large sum a few years ago, but that took qu
by Dunedan 10mo ago
Depends on various factors and of course the amount of money in question. I've had AWS approve a refund for a rather large sum a few years ago, but that took quite a bit of back and forth with them.
Crucial for the approval was that we had cost alerts already enabled before it happened and were able to show that this didn't help at all, because they triggered way too late. We also had to explain in detail what measures we implemented to ensure that such a situation doesn't happen again.
- rwmj 10mo agoWait, what measures you implemented? How about AWS implements a hard cap, like everyone has been asking for forever?
- Dunedan 10mo agoThe measures were related to the specific cause of the unintended charges, not to never incur any unintended charges again. I agree AWS needs to provide better tooling to enable its customers to avoid such situations.
- maccard 10mo agoWhat does a hard cap look like for EBS volumes? Or S3? RDS? Do you just delete when the limit is hit?
- __s 10mo agoIt's a system people opt into, you can do something like ingress/egress blocked, & user has to pay a service charge (like overdraft) before access opened up again. If account is locked in overdraft state for over X amount of days then yes, delete data
- maccard 10mo agoI can see the "AWS is holding me ransom" posts on the front page of HN already.
- School-Cotton 10mo agoYes, delete things in reverse order of their creation time until the cap is satisfied (the cap should be a rate, not a total)
- maccard 10mo agoI would put $100 that within 6 months of that, we'll get a post on here saying that their startup is gone under because AWS deleted their account because they didn't pay their bill and didn't realise their data would be deleted. > (the cap should be a rate, not a total) this is _way_ more complicated than there being a single cap.
- School-Cotton 10mo ago> I would put $100 that within 6 months of that, we'll get a post on here saying that their startup is gone under because AWS deleted their account because they didn't pay their bill and didn't realise their data would be deleted. The cap can be opt-in.
- maccard 10mo ago> The cap can be opt-in. People will opt into this cap, and then still be surprised when their site gets shut down.
- wat10000 10mo agoA cap is much less important for fixed costs. Block transfers, block the ability to add any new data, but keep all existing data.
- timando 10mo ago2 caps: 1 for things that are charged for existing (e.g. S3 storage, RDS, EBS, EC2 instances) and 1 for things that are charged when you use them (e.g. bandwidth, lambda, S3 requests). Fail to create new things (e.g. S3 uploads) when the first cap is met.
- maccard 10mo agoDoes that mean fail to create rds backups? And that AWS needs to keep your EC2 instance and RDS instance running while you decide if you really want to pay the bill?
- chillfox 10mo agoHow about something like what runpod does? Shutdown ephemeral resources to ensure there's enough money left to keep data around for some time.
- RestartKernel 10mo agoRunPod has its issues, but the way it handles payment is basically my ideal. Nothing brings peace of mind like knowing you won't be billed for more than you've already paid into your wallet. As long as you aren't obliged to fulfil some SLA, I've found that this on-demand scaling compute is really all I need in conjunction with a traditional VPS. It's great for ML research too, as you can just SSH into a pod with VScode and drag in your notebooks and whatnot as if it were your own computer, but with a 5090 available to speed up training.
- monerozcash 10mo ago>How about AWS implements a hard cap, like everyone has been asking for forever? s/everyone has/a bunch of very small customers have/
- rwmj 10mo agoI am never going to use any cloud service which doesn't have a cap on charges. I simply cannot risk waking up and finding a $10000 or whatever charge on my personal credit card.
- monerozcash 10mo agoAnd for amazon that's probably fine, people paying with personal credit cards are not bringing in much money.
- pyrale 10mo agoNothing says market power like being able to demand that your paying customers provide proof that they have solutions for the shortcomings of your platform.