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Comment by human20190310 | Hacker News Reader

human20190310

Is there a word for cloud billing anxiety yet?

I had an AWS account I wasn't using, but I didn't want to get surprised by any bills, so I set an alert to let me know when the bill was more than $0.

Sometime later the alert went off, so I anxiously jumped into AWS to see what kind of disaster was happening, and found that I got billed a few cents... for the alert itself.

I closed it altogether after that. It's better for my sanity to just use a new email address and sign up again than to worry about surprise bills.

EDIT: It's entirely possible that I set it up wrong, or set up the wrong thing, but in any case an alert was all I was trying to do, and as far as I could tell that's what happened. I must admit I rage-quit rather than investigate too deeply.

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> Sometime later the alert went off, so I anxiously jumped into AWS to see what kind of disaster was happening, and found that I got billed a few cents... for the alert itself.

They charge for billing alerts? I've never used AWS in production and I suppose it's a miniscule cost, but, wow, that seems really pedantic to charge for that.

AWS is a gigantic exercise in figuring out how to gouge customers. Case in point: charging API gateways per HTTP request.

Charging per request for something that has a cost to provide is reasonable (and it's a tiny charge in this case, $3.50/million or 0.00035 cents per request).

Otherwise there's no incentive for application developers to optimize their usage.

In my last company we charged per unit of work, but it was possible to send a lot of requests to do a tiny amount of work -- some customers hammered us with millions of requests to do each unit of work. It wasn't malicious and it worked with their workflow, but we lost money on those customers due to all of the infrastructure required for the request routing.

The company eventually started charging a nominal fee per request, which resolved the issue.

I don't necessarily disagree with you, but I don't think that's a strong example. Charging for utilization is the most obvious way to price a service, and http requests are the most obvious way to track utilization of an API gateway (or any load balancer).

Which other service provider puts a price tag on each HTTP request routed through a reverse proxy?

Some service providers such as Hetzner don't even charge for bandwidth up to 20TB, but somehow AWS found a way to hike the bill per HTTP request.

I've never used AWS so perhaps I'm mistaken, but api gateways normally provide extra functionality on top of just proxying the request. You can still set up a server listening on port 80 or 443 with a public IP and make requests to it without being charged per request.

You can, and if you want to use Lambdas, you can also route to them from ALBs, which has a bit confusing of a pricing model for comparison, but has no per-request cost.

Oh, ALBs. Now that's a mess. You'll either be charged per new connection, per concurrent connection, per byte, or per rule evaluation, depending on which is highest any given hour.

https://aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/pricing/

> Load Balancer Capacity Units

I'm baffled at the complexity of just ELB pricing. Do AWS customers just not care?

Hetzner does not charge for bandwidth anymore starting from half a year-ish(?) ago. Unmetered gigabit.

> charging API gateways per HTTP request.

You sort of had me in the first part, but you lost me here.

Charging $3 per million requests for a HTTP interface service?

How else should AWS charge for API Gateway?

(I suppose it could be bandwidth, but that doesn't make sense as API Gateway deals only in small messages; unlike ELB, S3, etc.)

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