AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance (opens in new tab)

You absolutely must, MUST, MUST be using separate AWS accounts for separate purposes. You can have as many as you’d like and roll up the billing into one actual paying account.

This is a win for accountability (roll up dev and easily see the split out for separate environments), but more importantly for security as it limits the blast radius for any one environment. Combined with per-account budget alerts it’s a win across the board.

Then last month I got an email saying "Hey, those quotas you were setting using the API documented to set quotas, those were actually not being enforced the whole time because of undocumented issues with our systems." So basically you can't rely on the documented behavior of these systems, there's no good way to test whether your code is correct or whether your limits will work without actually exceeding your budget for real, and the whole thing is a clusterfuck. When you get a surprise bill you just have to throw yourself at the mercy of whichever first line billing support rep is randomly assigned to your case.

Limiting your bill to something less than "potentially infinite" is just a basic fundamental feature that shouldn't require rolling your own bill-monitoring service relying on poorly documented and malfunctioning APIs with no provision for testing. There's no excuse strong enough to explain why the cloud providers can't do something reasonable here.

The "tiny bit of lag" between usage and billing calculation explodes when there's a lot of usage - in my case, a broken job tried resubmitting itself continuously, and the lag increased to 8 hours and $5000 just when I needed the alert the most. My team's response time was 5 minutes... After the 8 hour GCP lag.

Very similar to this guy's story: https://blog.tomilkieway.com/72k-1/

I had to go back and forth with them on email for weeks, and ultimately threaten them with a draft blog post with a lot of graphs and screenshots of their recommendations for them to cancel the bill.

https://blog.tomilkieway.com/72k-1/

I’d love it if GCP’s official method were to disable billing if your bill went over a limit.

Sadly, I suspect it would just disable systems instead.

I'm in love with DigitalOcean because you know the price you'd pay each month. If it's just 5 USD or 5000 USD, it's what you expected, nothing more.

I believe the rest of the clan (Linode, Vultr, etc.) give you the same certainty.

To be fair, AWS Lightsail should be an option too. Lightsail machines come with a fairly competitive amount of bandwidth.

Genuinely curious, is this just a side-effect of the cloud craze or did DDoS attacks become so powerful that old-school approaches of appropriately-sized bare-metal infrastructure with finite but unmetered bandwidth are no longer viable?

The way I see it, you can provision enough unmetered bandwidth to cover your typical load + a safety margin at a flat rate per month, and worst case scenario if the attack is big enough you merely get downtime (allowing you to re-evaluate the situation and decide whether to throw more bandwidth at the problem or purchase attack mitigation services) instead of an infinite bill?

My current ISP gives me 1Gbps unmetered. Worst case scenario the connection is saturated but at no point the ISP will come to me and ask for extra money.

The limited protections available against this threat from the big cloud providers have to be seen as a warning sign. It's only a matter of time before any small business using these services for hosting can be subject to sudden shakedowns by criminals. "Nice business-critical infrastructure you have there, be a shame if anything were to happen to it." Some of the providers do offer a DoS mitigation service, but the cost for the higher levels can start to look like a shakedown itself.

My guess is that billing lags enough that they can't stick to a price cap, which means that they either have to guarantee the price cap and swallow the difference, which could be exploited by malicious users to get free compute, or they have to say that there's a delay on it which makes the cap fairly useless.

Some of these services are billed by such small increments I can't even imagine how complex billing for them is in practice. I'd be surprised if bills are eventually consistent within 24 hours.

I wouldn't be surprised if we see an announcement like billing being guaranteed after 1 hour at some point in the not too distant future, but I'd be surprised if we see realtime caps.

A publicly accessible mainframe, where anyone anywhere in the world can script the provision of machines and other resources with little more than terminal and a text editor.

That would have been utopian science fiction in the heyday of the mainframe.

AWS's unknowable policy for the cost of errors represents a huge risk for individuals and small businesses. It puts a lot of people off.

- Good terms with proprietary lock-in.

- Milk that cow for all it's worth.

It's more nuanced than that -- I gave an oversimplified model -- but I've never seen anyone come out ahead doing business with Oracle long-term.

Reg. Section 1.461-1(a)(1) provides the following:

If an expenditure results in the creation of an asset having a useful life which extends substantially beyond the close of the taxable year, such an expenditure may not be deductible, or may be deductible only in part, for the taxable year in which made.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/26/1.461-1

If you buy 10+ months of AWS credits in December and have a Jan-Dec fiscal year, I'd argue that you bought "an asset having a useful life which extends substantially beyond the close of your taxable year"