[JMTQp8lwXL]

What does a billing issue look like? Is it something trivial, like they charged you for $X+X, but you only used $X (e.g., they double billed you -- should be solvable with a phone call)? Or more complex, e.g, they charged for more egress than you actually used (kind of hard to prove or disprove after the fact)?

[junon]

Not GP, but in my experience, AWS bills run away from you if you're not careful. They don't have great tooling (or, at least, accessible or intuitive tooling) to determine what your bill is going to be, or to set limits.

Pair that with a misconfiguration because of their horrendous web interface, and you're in for a surprisingly large bill at the end of the month.

Google, on the other hand, has some of the best tooling in the industry when it comes to billing and cost management. I dislike Google as much as the next guy but I'd feel more comfortable with them over AWS if I ever needed to choose.

[asciimike]

The last startup I was at repeatedly ended up with $25k AWS bills due to runaway elastic search clusters or dynamodb. The only reason we resolved them was due to us having hired our former AWS account rep.

I got my fair share of those from customers while at GCP, but I agree that in the past several years GCP has gotten much better at billing infra given all the problems we heard of...

[rezonant]

Honestly there are tons of examples of runaway bills on both, and neither provides much better of a way to handle visibility of cloud billing than the other. We could discuss the limitations of AWS' billing estimation systems ("only visible when you look!") or GCloud's budgeting system (which has notoriously questionable "limitations" https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/10/google_cloud_over_run...), but neither of the two are particularly better than the other at avoiding surprise billing.

There is this bias effect that is not common only to this part of the thread but this entire thread, and perhaps any discussion of "which cloud is better" where people who are clearly invested in one platform or another show biases that help them to justify their (or their company's) lock-in decisions.

This is not to say that cloud itself is a bad call, but it's crazy how many people out there don't realize how their situation and fear of "making the 'wrong' decision in the past" affects how they discuss the options (or even how they reinvest in a particular option later!), and how they claim "actually that vendor is worse than mine"

I have larger development investments in both AWS and in Google Cloud. They each have pros and cons but runaway billing is a gotcha of minute-by-minute rental billing of compute, storage and network services (the "cloud") and how we use it, and not really something specific to one vendor or another. It's just something that you have to be constantly aware of, constantly monitor, and work to avoid.

[latch]

It's 100% our mistake(s). It's only AWS fault indirectly, in that AWS is complicated and requires a lot of non transferable knowledge.

As a small example, we currently pay $750 for Route53. We don't know why (it isn't traffic). It has something to do with Route53 resolvers that our "lead sre" setup before leaving. AWS support doesn't understand how it's setup, and since $750 is relatively small, we've just left it.

[nostrebored]

Support is the wrong avenue to track this down -- I'd recommend reaching out to your account team!