[appstorelottery]

Running up a shitload of instances for testing and leaving all of them running overnight. Each of these instances continually rendered 4k video data to storage. This kind of test was supposed to be 1000x smaller, running for at most 10-20 seconds at time. He had written his own provisioning system which - according to his report - failed to properly manage instances "weird" edge case. No kidding.

[appstorelottery]

Every morning I would check AWS billing just out of habit. I'm just thankful I did - otherwise everything would have kept running...

The lesson for me was don't trust your internally-hacked-together instance management system. The AWS interface to storage and instances is the base truth. And perhaps more importantly - I'm never getting into another startup which has financial risk like that without being a core expert in that risk/tech. I was focused on the business + client code - and had very little clue about the nitty-gritty of AWS. I should have been more involved with the code on that side, or at least the data-flow architecture.

[epiphanitus]

SRE here. I feel for your situation. Here's some advice. One simple thing you could do is set up AWS billing alarms and have them delivered to a notification app like PagerDuty.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitori....

If you don't want to pay for PD, you can patch together any number of ways to get your phone to scream and holler when it gets an email from [e-mail]. It's also good to have clear expectations as to whose responsibility it is to deal with problem x between the hours of y and z and exactly what they are supposed to do.

Keep the alerts restricted to the really important stuff, because if your team becomes overloaded with useless alerts they will 1) dislike you and 2) be more prone to accidentally mistaking a five alarm fire for a burnt casserole.

There are more complex systems you could build, but that's a start.

[HenryBemis]

Thank you for this. How can anyone run ANY service with ANY company and not add a clause in the contract (and then have the alerts up an running) in controlling costs?

I remember PagerDuty was advertising (a lot) on Leo Laporte's podcasts a few years back.

A clause in the contract: if monthly bill reaches $Xk amount then:

(a) seek written approval by client, and

(b) continue until $Yk or approval is given with a new ceiling price.

[MattSayar]

I was just playing around with AWS a while ago and was surprised that I could not find any option to put a cap on the amount I'd spend in a month. Only thing I could do was set up alerts.

I imagine AWS would have 0 problems suspending all my services if I can't pay, so why can't it do the same thing when it reaches my arbitrary cap?

[lowercased]

> I'm never getting into another startup which has financial risk like that without being a core expert in that risk/tech

This may be something that is 'unstated', but unless you actually had access to fix something that was wrong, as well, being an expert in that wouldn't really help all that much. I've been in situations where I have explicit/expert knowledge of XYZ, but when the people responsible for XYZ do not take your input, and/or don't provide you the ability to fix a problem, expert knowledge is useless (or worse, it's like having to watch a train wreck happen when you know you could have stopped it).

[Aeolun]

This. But on the other hand, you can be ready with the popcorn when shit eventually does hit the fan.

[bluecmd]

And then have to live with asking yourself "could I have done more?"

[dmos62]

As in beer and crisps? /s

[amiga]

"...could I have saved the day if I were willing to loudly complain until someone listened?"

[justinclift]

On the other hand, it sounds like you hired someone who wasn't really up for the level of responsibility given. :(

In theory ;), you shouldn't have to be a core expert in everything. But yeah... in the real world, things aren't so cut and dry. :/

[nitely]

TBH, the real problem is AWS bills cannot be capped in any way (you can setup an alarm, though). It's unreasonable to expect a programmer won't make mistakes.

[manigandham]

Of course they can be capped, you just turn off the services. If you're asking them to automate that for you, then the counterpoint would be people accidentally setting a budget that wipes out their resources and complaining about that.

Easier for both sides to just ask AWS for a refund if there's a reasonable case.

[nicoburns]

> the counterpoint would be people accidentally setting a budget that wipes out their resources and complaining about that.

This wouldn't be an issue if it was configurable.

[manigandham]

Mistakes will always be an issue. How you recover is more important.

Would you rather make a mistake leading to a big bill with the possibility of a refund or set your max budget and have your resources permanently deleted?

[dragonwriter]

> Of course they can be capped, you just turn off the services.

That's not a he's cap, since turning off services isn't instant and costs continue to accrue. But, yes, there are ways to mitigate the risk of uncapped costs and they are subject to automation.

[manigandham]

See the sibling comment thread. It's just not that simple. It creates a lot of liability, could lead to permanent data loss, and doesn't really prevent any mistakes either (just swaps them for mistakes in budget caps).

AWS would rather lose some billings than deal with the fallout of losing data or critical service for customers (and in turn their customers).

[ngcc_hk]

Should be cap so you have a check. If your system does not allow threshold or assertion, please do not use it. If your cloud system do not have capped budget so you play in and alert you when you soon run out, do not use it.

[EpicEng]

>In theory ;), you shouldn't have to be a core expert in everything. But yeah... in the real world, things aren't so cut and dry. :/

Right. In my experience, if you don't understand what's going on beneath your abstractions, you're always in for a world of hurt as soon as something goes sideways.

[glenngillen]

Did you reach out to AWS support or your account manager? They’d definitely have worked something out.

[shawabawa3]

Did you contact AWS and let them know it was a mistake?

They have a good track record of cancelling huge bills the first time they happen

[seibelj]

Assuming you were incorporated and had a business account - declare bankruptcy and the bill goes away. I don’t understand why you would still pay the bill if you were going out of business anyway.

[appstorelottery]

Why didn't I file bankruptcy? This happened in Australia and declaring bankruptcy was not the right thing to do - for many reasons, not the least of which it makes it much harder to operate as a director of a previously bankrupt company, but in the worst case my bank would have just gone after me as I'd given a personal guarantee.

[garmaine]

There is no concept of limited liability in Australia?

[jkaplowitz]

Even in the United States, most small business loans require personal guarantees which narrowly override the corporate limited liability to make that guarantor liable for that debt if the company doesn't pay. There are some rare exceptions, and possibly more for startups funded by big-name VCs, but I don't know.

[Scoundreller]

But this isn't a small business loan: it's a debt to Amazon.

[garmaine]

I’ve worked in many early startups and I’ve never seen anyone use such a loan.

[hnick]

If a director becomes personally bankrupt (such as trying to be the good guy and using personal guarantees to take on company debts in an effort to scrape through) then they're banned from running a company until it clears. If they're the director of a company that goes bankrupt, I believe they get 2 chances (companies) before there's a chance of being banned from running more for a time.

Either way it might be nice to keep your options open, depending on your plans.

[scarface74]

Or you could just send an email to support and ask them to waive the charges.

[lostlogin]

If that got to the right person on the right day and they knew it was going to kill the company, it seems likely to help. And combined with the fact that it would probably guarantee future revenue way off into the future...

[scarface74]

I have never heard of a case where they wouldn’t give refunds. AWS is competing with the 95% of compute that is not running in the cloud (their own statistics). The last thing they want is a reputation that one mistake will bankrupt a business.

[manigandham]

We had spot instances with a mistakenly high bid that incurred thousands overnight when the prices spiked. No refund offered.

I know several other companies that had expensive mistakes without refunds. There's probably a complex decision tree for these issues and I doubt anyone really knows outside of AWS.

[Supermancho]

> I have never heard of a case where they wouldn’t give refunds.

Really? Working in Southern California a few years ago, refund requests were refused ALL THE TIME. This is why there's a common belief that what you are charged you simply owe them, period.

It may be more progressive now, but let's not be revisionist.

[aledalgrande]

Once I got something like a year of EC2 charges retroactively reimbursed for a few instances I hadn't used.

[staticassertion]

I've repeatedly seen requests of this nature handled by AWS - 75% cuts to billing, 90% cuts even.

[aojdoiasjdasd]

This. I work at Amazon and this is more common than you'd expect. "Customer obsession" and all that.

[hnick]

I'm not the type to 'want to speak to the manager' for my self-imposed problems but the more I hear about people coming out ahead the more I think I need to change my ways.

[gwd]

I think you have to think of it a bit more from Amazon's perspective. If you accidentally burn through your entire startup capital and shut down, they lose. If the risk of this sort of thing becomes well-known, then startups will start using other services rather than AWS, and the small fraction that grow big will be less likely to use AWS.

Being an entitled jerk who blames other people for your own negligence is bad, and you shouldn't change that. But openly giving companies the opportunity to be kind (while admitting that it was entirely your fault) potentially helps both them and you.

[cowsandmilk]

Yep, and an opportunity to educate on things like budgets and billing alarms to try to prevent this in the future.

[teddyuk]

Yeah, every time I’ve heard this story support have always fixed it, at least the first time per account

[101404]

AWS should have a cost cap. Set a max spend value and shut down all servers if you spent it.

[dragonwriter]

> AWS should have a cost cap. Set a max spend value and shut down all servers if you spent it.

That might make sense for some particular services (e.g., capping the cost on active EC2 instances) but lots of AWS costs of data storage costs, and you probably don't want all your data deleted because you ran too many EC2 instances and hit your budget cap.

Where exactly you are willing to shut off to avoid excess spend and what you don't want to sacrifice automatically varies from customer to customer, so there's no good one-size-fits-all automated solution.

[JamesBarney]

I think if resources had an option of "At cap: Do nothing, Shut down, shutdown and erase data" that would cover most of the use cases.

[jfkebwjsbx]

Keeping the data for a week but completely inaccessible would not be a huge cost for AWS yet a big relief for startups.

[samstave]

We used to have a bunch of billing graphs in stack driver with alerting thresholds to pagerduty to capture exactly situations like this.

[tomerico]

Why is there no way to set a limit on billing on AWS? Especially for cases like this, where killing testing instances does not have a dramatic negative effect...

[strongbond]

Agreed. The simple solution is an expenditure cap. Why can't Amazon implement one? The fear of it going wrong like this would make me keep away from AWS forever.

[ehsankia]

Wait, is there really not one on AWS? I thought this was the #1 most important feature on any such cloud systems.

It's the very very first thing I set when setting up my GCloud hobby project. I was like, this is fun and all, but I don't care about this enough so I limited it to 3$ per day and 50$ per month. If it goes above, I'm very happy to let it die, and it also gives me a warning so I know something is up. The 2 times it triggered, there was something I managed to fix so the tool is still up and running costing pennies.

[Itsdijital]

I got pegged to the wall by aws once on a hobby project. $1500 racked up in two months. Apparently I left a snapshot in some kind of instant restore state to the tune of $0.75/hr. I used the instance for 2 days, and then shut everything down. Or at least thought I did.

The account I did it on was tied to my "junk" email, so I didn't catch amazon banging on my door saying my payment info needed to be updated. Well until I did happen upon one of the emails. Nearly had a heart attack.

Talked to aws support and they full refunded me. Very very kind of them, but now I'm terrified to touch anything aws.

[ufmace]

I don't think an expenditure cap is so simple. Exactly what happens when you hit it? If you have, let's say, 3 RDS DBs and 20 EC2 instances running and a bunch of stuff in S3 and a few dozen SQS queues and a few DynamoDB tables etc, and your account goes over the limit, how do you decide which service you want to automatically cut?

[JamesBarney]

So 90% of the time I hear these horror stories it's a test/dev account where deleting everything is preferable to getting a bill.

I also don't understand why everyone is assuming

"if I hit threshold X do A, if I hit threshold Y do B" where A and B are some combination of shutting down and deleting resources,

is as difficult as solving NP complete.

[jimmaswell]

> Why can't Amazon implement one?

Greed, I'm assuming.

[joshvm]

Nowadays quotas give you some safety net. For example you usually have to request more than one GPU to avoid burning money that way, or more than say 32 instances. It should not be possible for a new account to spawn 1k VMs overnight.

The problem with billing is that often these charges are not calculated instantly, and others are not trivial to deal with. For example what happens if you go over budget on bandwidth or bucket storage, but still within quota? What do you kill? Do you immediately shut down everything? Do you lose data? There are lots of edge cases.

You can normally write your own hooks to monitor billing alerts and take action appropriately.

[zknz]

There are service limits on new accounts per region - 20 EC2 instances. These require a ticket lodged to over-ride.

[nicoburns]

You can still burn an awful lot of money with 20 EC2 instances.

[grecy]

... put a credit card on the account that only has a $1000 limit. Or better yet, a prepaid one.

[monktastic1]

In this case wouldn't it just cause Amazon to send you a notice that the $10k overnight charge was declined and you should enter another payment method?

[user5994461]

How many is a shitload of instances? Are we talking tens, hundreds, thousands?

In my experience AWS had very stringent limits on the amount of active instances of each type (starts around 10 for new accounts, 2 for the more expensive instances). It takes tickets to support then days of waiting to raise these limits.

That should have prevented your company from creating tens of instances, let alone hundreds, unless that's already your typical daily usage.

[redis_mlc]

There used to be no limit on EC2 instances.

[yingw787]

Holy crap dude, that's some nightmare shit right there.

Does AWS update the billing console per day or upon request? I get charged per month, but I should add a habit in my habit tracker to learn more about my expenses...

[freeone3000]

Hourly. You can also set up billing alerts, which will email you.

[WrtCdEvrydy]

Be aware that some services bill asynchronously so it can take 24 hours in some instances.

[lostlogin]

This is what was needed.

[x86_64Ubuntu]

What's the technical process to ensure that this never happens? Nowadays, having to have someone "watch" the test and then kill the instances is manual labor which is a no-no. So how do you make it so that your test fires up the instances, and then kills them when the test is done.

[jrockway]

I think you have to have an upper bound set with AWS that kills stuff when you have reached the amount of money you want to spend. But of course, people would whine about that. "How AWS killed my business on the busiest day of the year," would probably be the article title.

[JamesBarney]

But I hate far more sympathy for "I made an AWS mistake and got hit with an 100k bill" than "I told AWS to turn off my ec2 instances at 10k, and then at 10k it turned off my ec2 instances"

[catlifeonmars]

There are many ways to solve this problem. One way to do this is to model your test infrastructure in CloudFormation. You can then use an SSM Automation Document to manage the lifecycle of your test. Putting all your infrastructure in CloudFormation allows you to cleanup all of the test resources in single DeleteStack API call, and the SSM Document provides: (1) configurable timeout and cleanup action when the test is done, (2) auditing of actions taken, and (3) repeatability of testing.

[Twirrim]

Not sure if this would help in this particular scenario, but unit and integration testing of operations scripts can save a lot of pain, anguish and $$s too.

It's horrifying how many places treat writing tests for services as critical, but then completely fail to write tests for their operational tooling. Including tools responsible for scaling up and down infrastructure, deleting objects etc.

[dirtydroog]

But if a test fails does it now mean you're bankrupt?

[Twirrim]

Could do? Not sure what your point is here.

[rcxdude]

You can do timed instances, and/or make the instances have timed job to shutdown after a fixed time (which is what I use to shut down an instance which only gets spooled up for occasional CI jobs after an hour).

[bluecmd]

+1. When I had to use AWS for batch workloads, which at the time at least didn't have a TTL attribute on VMs, I made sure that the VM first scheduled a shutdown in like 30 min if the test was supposed to only run in 10 min.

[dev_throw]

You can use auto scaling groups with a load balancer to terminate instances when not in use and spin them up as required.

[WrtCdEvrydy]

This is why it's Terraform or nothing for me.

[scubbo]

I'd be fascinated to hear how Terraform would have intelligently known that those instances were not meant to stay on overnight.

[WrtCdEvrydy]

Honestly, I'd create the instances using an ASG, then set the ASG size to 0 (or throw inside a while loop until any errors go away). Always create instances from an AMI and always put them in an ASG (even if the ASG only has 1 item min, target, and max on it).

[jenkinstrigger]

I love Terraform and ASGs but that still doesn't solve the fact that their SRE overprovisioned. They might have even used both things!