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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

I'm still absolutely blown away we tolerate an industry model with uncapped cost. The fact that anyone will even do business with a cloud provider built like this absolutely blows my mind, like every CFO all collectively lost their marbles.

Fortune 500 companies have literally just decided handing blank checks to Amazon and Microsoft every month to make their technology needs disappear was good business sense.

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>I'm still absolutely blown away we tolerate an industry model with uncapped cost

Try reading the contract you have to sign before receiving medical care :)

Water is the same deal. If the water pipe going between your house and your garage leaks 30 olympic swimming pools worth of water deep underground, your utility company will be more than happy to set you up with a payment plan.

AWS isn't the only example of giving blank checks to some vendor...

Although it'd be hard not to notice before the leak is even halfway through one swimming pool worth. On AWS it's fairly easy for the charges to rack up for quite a while.

(Also, at least around here if the water agency notices abnormal flow for a long time they drive by and if they see a leak they shut off the water. Happened to me once when a sprinkler pipe blew out.)

Not in my case. Leaked about three Olympic pools of water and we have zero clue where any of it went.

I have a theory that this is why the cloud is popular with big businesses.

Every big business has an in-house data centre, which is operated as a cost centre; success, for a cost centre, means delivering service as cheaply as possible. Providing an easy way for developers to spin up new databases? That would practically be an invitation to increase costs - it's the last thing they should be doing!

So when a developer from that big corporation uses AWS and encounters an environment that makes it easy for them to spin up a new database, it's a big productivity increase.

I absolutely understand why in-house IT and dev folks like it: It literally removes the ability for budgeting people to tell them no. And the cost of new uses starts small and is granular, so by the time finance folks see it, it's already done and a critical component and no longer optional.

It literally removes agency from financial folks and gives it to tech people.

This is good and bad. It's good if you have competent tech staff. Right now my org is battling for basic resources like gsuite and okta licenses for their new hires because the CFO is complaining. It's absurd.

If you have competent tech staff you can inhouse it on any of a dozen hypervisors for roughly the capital cost you would spend in 6 months on cloud.

Every year on the cloud can roughly cover the expense for double that capacity deployed on prem.

Complaints of "operational costs" generally assume a woefully incompetent staff.

This has happened before as a tech manager in different companies. When looking to implement some new technology (say, a new Cassandra like database) I have two options: either a) I choose ScyllaDB, and have to go through all the "additional vendor" internal process, that with ISO27001 gets terribly bureaucratic; or b) I start using DynamoDB or Keyspaces transparently and let the current AWS bill increase.

For me it has always been a no brainer to avoid the bureaucratic pain.

How health care works. Show up anywhere. They can more or less charge you anything they want, destroy your credit if you can’t pay.

Of course the conversation is usually about how to get someone else to pay the bill instead of get costs under control.

The American dream.

"the conversation is usually about how to get someone else to pay the bill instead of get costs under control"

Unfortunately most of us Americans cannot comprehend this fact or are too helpless to do anything about it. I love the folks who tout their awesome employer based plan without really thinking about the insane costs just because they are not the ones paying most of it. I also love the folks who just think a total Universal Healthcare like Medicare for All is the solution which honestly I am not totally against but only if the costs are first regulated in any way.

Universal health care in itself is a driver for regulating costs if it’s implemented as single payer. The idea is there is a monopoly on supply of patients, so if you want to practice, you have to accept the billing rate the payer (govt) deems necessary. It’s like price collusion but done in order to depress prices.

I am willing to try anything that what we have right now in healthcare BUT looking at Medicare by itself, I am a bit wary of Govt's involvement completely. I think we should cut out the middleman mafia a.k.a Insurance company from EVERY visit and instead let care providers compete in the market. i am ok for a nephrologist to charge $x more than the next door nephrologist as long as their service and care is better and let the patients decide that. I do agree that Govt. should step in to probably regulate price gouging so that no one can charge me $500 for a toilet paper roll.

Trying to hold on to the small government ideas and remove the government along with health insurance companies from the equation is a non-starter. As is saying that you want competition, but limited government, but also no gouging.

Competition is how your stop gauging.

Competition only works when you understand the service process, and can make a decision to go to another provider with little cost. When they bring in a medical provider or have to perform another procedure while you are unconscious, you can't defend against gouging.

There's actually a term for this - monopsony. I've only ever heard it used in the context of universal healthcare.

The theory: government sets the prices because it controls the supply of patients

The practice: you pay for a news article about a grandma unable to get healthcare. The government reacts by ensuring that all healthcare is paid for - with no cap to cost. After all, every life is sacred.

COVID-19 response showed us.

> My mother is not expendable. Your mother is not expendable.

> We will not put a dollar figure on human life.

https://mobile.twitter.com/nygovcuomo/status/124247702908329...

  > I'm still absolutely blown away we tolerate an industry model with uncapped cost.

How could the cost be capped? Fortune 500 companies run their global infrastructure on AWS, so AWS has to support these huge use cases. If you've set "spending limits", an adversary that has your credentials can change your limits to those same limits used by the F500 companies.

> If you've set "spending limits", an adversary that has your credentials can change your limits to those same limits used by the F500 companies.

The way I have seen this being operazionalized in AWS is by Finance having the exclusive access to a "parent" AWS account controlling billing (and nothing else), and then providing sub-acconts to Production, Development, Data Science and other technical stakeholders.

Exactly! This is the one reason I refuse to use AWS and am constantly surprised so many people are willing to have this risk on them. I'd rather get a VPS with DigitalOcean and know that they cannot charge me tens of thousands if somebody hacks my account.

And despite your misgivings, businesses in every industry have now been on AWS for years without the doom predicted in every thread.

There's no doom here, just exactly what we are seeing: Businesses running on increasingly thinner margins, except tech companies, sitting on wild profits from this business model.

So big tech is vampirising all the other companies and are responsible for our economic downturn? No.

> And despite your misgivings, businesses in every industry have now been on AWS for years without the doom predicted in every thread.

Well the doom does sometimes happen, perhaps not well publicized. I've been in one startup that ran out of money where the astounding AWS bill was part of the demise. And in another startup where the AWS bill hindered growth since it took such a large slice of the funding.

I wonder if they have different contracts from most of us?

It's not uncapped cost. Almost every service has a default limit to how many instances/butckets/etc that you can create. All of that creates a monthly cap of somewhere likely south of $1B. As long as you have that much cash on hand you shouldn't have to worry about getting ruined.

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