[benjaminwootton]

I had an incident where a SaaS product went haywire and ran up a $10k bill. I was quite shocked when AWS didn’t write it off and pursued me for the money. You can’t necessarily assume a cloud provider will have your back in these situations.

[schnebbau]

I accidentally ordered a $200 bottle of wine instead of a $20 bottle at a restaurant once, but didn't realise until after the whole bottle was gone. I was not shocked when the restaurant expected me to pay for it, because obviously I was totally responsible.

Why would AWS be any different?

[BartjeD]

... Because building and running a piece of software is a vastly more complicated process than ordering a bottle of wine and drinking it.

The way to hell is paved with well intended analogies.

[schnebbau]

The complexity of the process of causing loss to another does not absolve you from it.

[benjaminwootton]

It certainly mitigates it. I have many years of experience with AWS and installed Databricks, an off the shelf product through their SaaS portal.

I certainly feel less responsible and more aggrieved when that situation costs me a lot of money than in the $200 wine example.

[kelnos]

That doesn't really matter, though. A cloud provider would likely have different motives and apply a different calculus to the decision of whether or not to offer a refund in a case like this, than a restaurant would over a bottle of expensive wine.

Amazon is thinking about customer retention and growth, and about the goodwill lost in refusing such a request. The restaurant is thinking about the likelihood that someone is just trying to get out of paying for something for which they did actually understand the cost.

[kelnos]

Because the actual cost to AWS for a customer accidentally racking up an expensive bill is minuscule compared to the cost of that bottle of wine to the restaurant.

Amazon also has an interest in keeping their customers happy, and keeping usage growing. A customer who gets a refund for accidental or fraudulent usage is much more likely to remain a loyal customer, and hopefully spend more on the platform in the future. A restaurant, while in the hospitality industry, is likely more concerned with their razor-thin margins.

Also I would expect the true motive in your example is that the restaurant-goer is trying to scam the restaurant out of an expensive bottle of wine, and I'm sure most restaurant managers would agree with me. The AWS customer is not only more likely to have made an honest mistake, but AWS support has tools available to look at the usage and make a more nuanced decision as to whether or not the customer is telling the truth.

(And I have witnessed quite a few situations where Amazon has written off usage bills in cases like this. So clearly they agree with me on this, at least some of the time. Not all of the time, of course, as the grandparent poster can attest to.)

[chrisandchris]

Everything you say can be vice-versa said and will apply too (or if it does not apply, it's a subjective IMHO).

A restaurant has an interest in keeping customers happy, and keep recurring customers growing.

I would also expect, that the average cloud user made a mistake a professional should not have made and is now trying to get out of it the easy way. I mean, what do you expect if you post your credentials to GitHub (just an assumption)? Same as if you order wine without looking at the price. Your fault.

Also, a single bottle of 200$ is minuscule compared to the monthly/yearly renting fee a restaurant needs to pay, which can be many thousands.

Long story short: IMHO it all comes down to how good one can tell that it's really a mistake and there were multiple mistakes which could hardly be avoided which lead to this issue.

[voakbasda]

Some restaurants pull a bait and switch on customers ordering wine, bringing a similar bu wildly more expensive bottle in place of the one that was ordered, hoping for exactly the outcome that you described.

I would be shocked to find a cloud provider doing that, but I wanted to point out that you might be not have made a real mistake.

[benjaminwootton]

My point was not to assume that cloud providers would write off the cost of errors or security issues.