Someone made an infinite recursion loop through the aws cloud and racked up 86,000$ of bills in a few hours

Failure in setting billing limits is a source of suffering for the account owner, and a source of laughter and ridicule to the onlookers.

Bwahahahahhahaaaaa

What kind of loop that caused 86k in few hours and what resources did it spin up? I'm just curious tbh

@gitpush i guess thats the outcome of aws's trashlord business model which automatically increases your tiers to more expensive servers without your permission and then you have to pay for it. Who the fuck does that. Why cant you have a "handbrake" button to STOP automatically increasing tiers to expensive servers

@NeatNerdPrime do alerts STOP you from getting billed? No. Do they stop you from aws automatic tier increase to use more expensive servers without your permission? NO. Why the fuck they don't have an option for me to prefer my app breaking from insufficient server storage or memory, rather than paying 100k in bills? Oh yes thats because jeff bozos needs to fuel his megayacht

That’s fucking robbery, no way anyone should pay 86k hell even 5 percent of that for 3hrs of running code. He should definitely protest that shit

good luck trying to find a place to sleep on the streets lol

@b2plane That's the business model of that cloud scam: lulling unsuspecting customers into a false sense of security, then ripping them off.

Advanced technique: change the billing structure from time to time, put default values wherever the new structure has something new, and deprecate old options along with their chosen values. Ofc, the new default values are optimised to enable the cloud scam. :)

I would NOT pay it. What will they do, call the police about me not participating in their billing scam? Lol

@gitpush I'm not sure if it's the same story, but someone had a lambda function trigger on an upload to an s3 bucket. It did some processing and put the final file on the same bucket, which triggered the function again.

In this story, aws has price limits on aws to get email alerts and stop scaling. They're set a little high, but the guy had disabled these features.

In this instance, AWS wrote off the bill for him and helped him get his lambda functions back under control.

@lungdart There's an important difference between accident and negligence.

I had similar issues with AWS before, when you ask nicely they drop the charges.

What I did to prevent idiot-me from racking up bills, was creating my personal AWS Organization and then putting policies in place that don't allow expensive resource to be spun up.

Do people actually pay these ridiculously high bills?

@-red OP definitely will.

https://devrant.com/rants/8644405/...

I said it... Infrastructure is hard. Mistakes could give you a lifetime of bills.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

@SidTheITGuy What if people don’t have that much money?

Even though I think laws should require some protection against these things; as in by default safeguard against high cost.
It is perfectly possible to set limits to prevent this in any cloud setup. Those limits will prevent the cost overruns but will also give you downtime when you hit it.

"Automatically increase your tiers to more expensive servers without your permission"
That sounds incorrect. Either it's a fully managed service that scales with the load and you agreed to pay for that load or you configured your own auto-scalers and you did it possibly wrong.