Amazon S3 will no longer charge for several HTTP error codes
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The default is to have current and estimated monthly cost displayed on your root console as soon as you login. You will also get email alerts when you hit 50% and then 80% of your "free tier quota" in a month.
> even if you're not doing anything with the service except looking around.
I'm not aware of any services which will cost you money unless you actively enable them and create an object within it's class. Many services, such as S3, will attempt to force you into a "secured" configuration that avoids common traps by default.
> For example, PostgreSQL is advertised as free, but "Aurora PostgreSQL" is quite costly.
There's a rubric to the way AWS talks about it's internal services that is somewhat impenetrable at first. It's not too hard to figure out, though, if you take the time to read through their rather large set of documentation. That's the real price you must pay to successfully use the "free tier."
Anyways.. PostgreSQL is an open source project. Amazon RDS is a managed service that can run instances of it. Amazon Aurora is a different service that provides it's own engine that is _compatible_ with MySQL and PostgreSQL.
To know why you'd use one or the other, the shibboleth is "FAQ," so search for "AWS Aurora FAQ" and carefully read the whole page before you enable the service.
I don't even know where I would start with that. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ lists documentation for 305 different products!
It's a really easy to set up app!
It does if you ask it to. You can get billing alerts if current costs are projected to go over a threshold.
There's so much UX for a prospective new AWS dev that could be improved. Say a 1 click "do you want billing alerts with that?" Template, or a "do you want to lock down expensive nonfree stuff?" option to set some soft limits to zero out of the gate (nescessitating a self serve support case to unblock).
It's frustrating. It's been this way for over a decade yet you'll still see new customers cutting themselves on the nuances of free tier. I get that AWS is 'enterprise real deal do what I say', but I don't think that means you should completely exclude the customer story of any new developers just getting their feet wet. It's an area of customer obsession the business has regrettably lacked, and if you go by the continuous stories of people messing it up on HN/twitter/reddit/etc, it only becomes more glaring how little the new guys are being taken care of.
If they auto-charge once the trial is over, I don't like them. That is a dark pattern.
Equally, with this, AWS could very well ask you, the user, what you'd like to do if you surpass the free tier. Charge? Or turn it all off.
On top of that they could instate default thresholds so that you, the person who just started their free trial, does not get bill shock when you forget to turn of that $200/h machine.
Fixed price cloud offerings exist for some services, but can end up with an apparently larger sticker price.
Jeff Barr acknowledges S3 unauthorized request billing issue - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40221108 - May 2024 (18 comments)
How an empty S3 bucket can make your AWS bill explode - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40203126 - April 2024 (111 comments)
The steps were to raise a big enough fuss that it would undermine customer trust if the team didn't fix it.
Being responsive isn't about having infinite resources. It's about prioritization. I doubt at the time this was anywhere near the top of the list for them to fix even for the person who tweeted years ago.
I administered a VBulletin forum, and naturally, we installed all sorts of gewgaws onto it, including an "arcade" where people could play games, share high scores, etc.
This arcade, somehow, came with its own built-in comment system, one where users could somehow register without registering for a proper VBulletin user account on our instance, and thus without admins being notified.
One day, we discovered this whole underbelly community that had apparently been thriving under our metaphorical floorboards, and promptly evicted them. In hindsight, I probably should have found some way to let them stick around, but recently several things had happened that hardened our stance to any sort of un-wanted users.
When you read a sequential series of keys (404 403 403 404 = 0110) it will either tell you the data you were looking for or the next key name to begin reading from.
Seems you could compute the response, store it somewhere (memcached or something), and then return an error. Then have the caller make another call to retrieve the response. (To associate the two requests, have the caller generate a UUID and pass it on both calls.)
That doesn't make it entirely free, but it reduces the compute cost of every request to just reading from a cache.
(This does sound like a good way to get banned or something else nasty, so it's definitely not a recommendation.)
take an awful lot of time to get that data out, though.
So you're going to have a lot of consumers of the same bit stream before you've somehow made the covert, "free" egress a net positive value versus a regular object. I imagine AWS can trivially put in place some throttling of error responses to make this impractical.
Ignoring these economic issues, imagine a content-addressing scheme like /stream-identifier/bitnumber which you can then poll to fetch one bit per request. Populate an object (which will return 403) for 1 bits and omit an object (which will return 404) for 0 bits.
You also need to know some stream length or "end of stream" limit. Otherwise you can't tell if you've read past the end or are really fetching 0 bits of a longer stream.
One strategy might be to use an 8b/10b encoding so you can detect when you're not getting a valid symbol anymore. You could treat that as end of stream if it is supposed to be static, or go into some polling mode to wait for more symbols to be posted.
Hybrid strategies might use regular objects or recursive use of these streams to publish metadata streams that tell you about the available stream names, lengths, and encoding schemes.
That’s what glacier is for!
I was wondering about that one.
So will Amazon continue charge for the redirected 403?
In any case 2 weeks seems like an impressive turnaround for such a large service, unless they'd been internally preparing to acknowledge the problem for longer
I assume they were lucky in that whatever system counts billable requests also has access to the response code, and therefore it's pretty easy to just say "if response == 403: return 0".
The fact that is the case suggests they may do the work to fulfill the request before knowing the response code and doing billing, so there might be some loophole to get them to do lots of useful work for free...
Have often wondered about this in terms of some of their control plane APIs, a read-only IAM key used as part of C&C infrastructure for a botnet might be interesting, you get DNS/ClientHello signature to a legitimate and reputable service for free, while stuffing "DDoS this blog" e.g. in some tags of a free resource. Even better if the AWS account belonged to someone else.
But certainly, ability to serve an unlimited URL space from an account with only positive hits being billed seems ripe for abuse. Would guess there's already some ticket for a "top 404ers" internal report or similar
Sure, here you go: There was some buzz and negative press so it got picked up by the social media managers who forwarded it to executive escalations who loops in legal. Legal realizes that what they are doing is borderline fraud and sends it to the VP that oversees billing as a P0. It then gets handed down to a senior director who is responsible for fixing it within a week. Comms gets looped in to soft announce it.
At no point does anyone look at log data or give a shit about any instrumentation. It is a business decision to limit liability to a lawsuit or BCP investigation. As a publicly traded company it is also extremely risky for them to book revenue that comes from fraudulent billing.
But the only way that matters is the core one - analysis, data, and instrumentation.
AWS does not make these kinds of decisions without a look at the metrics.
I don't want to debate the merits of what happened, but a prosecutor is going to open with "AWS billed people for things they never asked for or consented to." You're already fighting an uphill battle that it is not fraud.
Now what is going to save you is intent. If your defense is "yeah we identified the problem and corrected it" you're good to go. If on the other hand, someone decides to run a fucking metrics report of how much you could lose by stopping doing fraud and god forbid it is ever seen or mentioned in front of anyone in the decision making path - you now have to deal with mens rea.
If you have material knowledge that someone took "a look at the metrics", shoot me an email. I can help put you in touch with programs that offer financial rewards for whistleblowers.
This is how I found out about it last week: https://youtu.be/OWggTcVgiNg?si=RnxDq1y6-yr_SQ8L
How about the financial losses of customers that could be DDoS-ed into bankruptcy through no fault of their own? Keeping S3 bucket names secret is not always easy.
Well, GDPR showed a bit that rather global impact is possible.
If you offer an open service on the internet you need to be prepared that users and misusers will cause costs.
However, if you block it for public access you as a customer are not offering a public service. It's the cloud provider offering a public service so it seems just a basic legal principle that it's the cloud provider who pays for misuse (attempts to access something that is not public). But of course big corporations are not known for fair contracts respecting legitimate interest of the customer before legal action is on the horizon. I wonder what made AWS wake up here.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/aws-best-prac...
I can't believe that their 'fix' is to set a wildcard dns entry, this feels somewhat like a joke.
Does this mean that a NXDOMAIN response costs more than a successful response?
Google Cloud and Azure also bill DNS like this. Unless you need some of the advanced features you really shouldn't host your DNS in the big cloud providers.
I understand it’s still hitting Route53 infrastructure, but I’m not using it, and it’s not commonplace to charge for NXDOMAIN records. Because of this, I’m unable to host at AWS (prohibitively expensive for my use-case).
It’s worth mentioning that DNS infrastructure for things like this are very cheap (I used to self-host the DNS infrastructure for this domain for ~$2.5/mo), so the up charge is even worse that what AWS is charging for bandwidth. If they brought it in line with actual costs, I wouldn’t have as much of a problem.
I fail to see this as progress, YMMV =3