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Comment by ajb | Hacker News Reader

I can understand why though. One employers first use of a GPU instance was when we were hacked and someone fired up a few to mine crypto, only a day off which cost us a few $1000 that, fortunately, AWS refunded. It's quite likely that most users don't use them and that it is a good signal that you've been hacked.

They have a quota system for sending emails too, and it's not because they need to purchase any hw for sending more emails. It's because those are also a magnet for hackers.

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If AWS was really clear about what you were spending then it would be easy to be running an app that tells you the AWS usage and alerts you of anomalous patterns.

My bank contacts me if there are any questionable transactions.

Surely AWS is capable of this?

AWS Cost Explorer gives a pretty good breakdown. There’s also Cost Anomaly Detection https://aws.amazon.com/aws-cost-management/aws-cost-anomaly-...

I think you would be shocked at how often banks have similar restrictions on corporate accounts. As would you be surprised at how often companies are hacked.

AWS will tell you as much as you want to know about how munch you’re spending. Cost breakdowns and billing alerts are more configurable than you’ll see pretty much anywhere else. This is a miscategorisation of the problem with AWS billing. The actual problem - which is not misunderstood - is that it’s complicated. There’s a reason that AWS has an unwritten ‘one-time get out of jail free card’ system if you accidentally mess up and charge $50,000 to your corporate credit card. And there’s a reason that a condition of this escape hatch is that you set up billing alerts like you should as a responsible person hooking up a PAYG service to what’s sometimes an effectively infinite line of credit.

That's like saying the Internet will tell you all you want to know.

Yes, (most of) the detail is in the CUR/CBR - but you have to be smart enough to understand it.

It's misleading to say that AWS will tell you all you want to know. Try getting them to explain your network costs in detail using network load balancers in a simple email.

> Surely AWS is capable of this?

I'm sure they're capable of many things that they don't actually want to do.

They do this. There's a fine place between balancing the overhead (contacting customers, monitoring) and false positives.

But if weird stuff happens, AWS will take action. I'm sure part of it is because they care, but another is because they don't want to get stuck holding the buck.

In that world, you better make it very difficult to change your alerts downard: Otherwise, the very first thing a hacker would do is to take over the alert system, and only then start using your account for their profit-making ventures.

AFAICT, its more that they can't keep GPUs in stock. Even large users of GPU have to request quotas in new AZs.

Lambdalabs used to have spot instances for GPUs and now they are completely sold out. Even vast.ai hardly has any A100 instances. We are starting to see paperclip maximizer economics start with GPUs since they are so damned useful.

Well, paperclips are clearly useful, not so sure about ChatGPTs ... so far looks like their effect is net negative - more cheating and more spam of all kinds.

It's okay for an infitely burstable product to delay provisioning services by 24 hours and require you to capacity plan in specific detail before you can use things?

I don't agree. Their reality distortion field is fooling customers, AWS has their cake and eats it too. Try being a startup and spin up 1000 c6in.8xlarge for a 2 hour batch job.

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