This is really awesome. When I was younger, I accidentally kept a gpu AWS instance on for a week or two and racked up $1K+ bill (which Amazon thankfully forgave). Been kinda traumatized and haven’t used any cloud related service since then for personal projects. This might make me try it out again!
Same! Did it with Amazon and they forgive a $200 debt (gotta say something for amazing customer service), did it with Google and they would not forgive a much smaller $40 debt (also gotta say something for terrible customer service I suppose). Will probably turn to AWS and certainly not Google again if I ever need the cloud.
It's good customer service on one hand, terrible customer service on the other hand, in that there should be ways to prevent this from happening in the first place. Waiving charges for those who beg forgiveness reduces the number of public complaints about the lack of planning capacity for cloud service costs. The better solution would be to implement budgeting & cost limiting tools.
> I checked into a hotel yesterday, and will check out this morning. I don’t consider it bad customer service that they want to get paid for that room.
What if you forgot to check out, and the hotel kept charging you for the room until you got a bill at the end of the month? (ie you got a bill for 20 nights).
I know that’s not how hotels work, but it’s how these cloud services work.
I don't disagree that there should be some kind of scheduling or, at least, some kind of cost limitation.
But the hotel is the same thing, right? If you don't check out, and they keep the room empty because they think you're using it, you're still monopolizing the resource.
How can they make the difference between someone who will be back but just happened to spend a few nights away (say using the hotel as a base for trips) and someone who won't be back but forgot to check out?
But I guess, in the case of hotels, you can usually tell them "I'll be here for X days" upfront. Then again, if you change your mind, they won't always reimburse you the cost you've paid.
> But the hotel is the same thing, right? If you don't check out, and they keep the room empty because they think you're using it, you're still monopolizing the resource.
Sure but how easy is it to accidentally book an open-ended hotel room stay?
I'd imagine "not very" because there'd certainly be a huge deposit required and/or proof of finances, etc.
these cloud services intentionally try to get you to make such spending mistakes by not providing an option to set a budget or time limit, or auto shutdown on idle.
i assume AWS learned to target businesses with this shady strategy, which do waste huge amounts of money this way, instead of burning bridges with hobbyist developers over pennies that later will avoid using AWS at the workplace if given the choice.
On Azure if you create a VM, by default it'll be set to auto shutdown at 7pm that night, I think you can turn it off but by default it's on to avoid billshock.
I don't recall this being the case from the time I tried Azure, and can't find anything about it in the documentation. It would leave many people wondering why their instance was turned off.
Perhaps it is a feature of Azure Lab Services, and you were using that?
Just looked it up, apparently it's only happens with ARM (Azure Resource Manager) templates, I usually pick the Ubuntu or Windows server ones which is why it applies the autoshutdown rule.
As the sibling said, I don't remember seeing that. I don't usually use Azure, so when I last started a VM there a few months ago I didn't do any special config, and the VM kept on running forever, as expected.
And there are no policies set up by someone else that I don't know about, we don't usually use Azure for VMs.
