I have said it over and over and will repeat it happily:
IF your Services doesn't has a proper limit, you do make yourself suddenly liable to a much higher risk than before and you have to be aware of this.
It is the same shit when you rent a car: Do NEVER rent a Car without proper insurance.
I'm working with GCP professionally and i have used AWS in the prev company. I do ask my manager if i can use it to try a few things out and its fine but i will not put my credit card behind an account with unlimited cost risk (its limited probably but you know what i mean).
And its not even simple; Everything costs you money. Storing data, receiving data, pushing data, making api requests etc.
And what i find always quite surprising: How often people, even on hn, present simple file based apis where you can upload images and edit them or upload files and download them again or offering free services and that with AWS as a backend.
I just might be to long in this industry to see all those pitfalls of exploits and risks everywhere but i have the feeling that obvious respect against cloud service billing is neglected by most.
I believe it's the same effect as micro-transactions in mobile games.
It's really easy to justify paying $1 for a small upgrade while you're playing. And only afterwards you notice that those $1 added up and have financially ruined you.
In the same way, $0.08 per GB (the effective price in the article) sounds really small and easy to justify. And we forget how they can accumulate...
Yes, but it's hard for a third party to weaponize that against you ;-)
You want to destroy a small startup with a free alpha version and AWS (or similar) backing?
Sure go ahead and send them tons of _legit_ (looking) traffic. This will first mess up their bill for this month and then mess up their statistics for the next month (when all the user they got disappear at once)...
IF your Services doesn't has a proper limit, you do make yourself suddenly liable to a much higher risk than before and you have to be aware of this.
It is the same shit when you rent a car: Do NEVER rent a Car without proper insurance.
I'm working with GCP professionally and i have used AWS in the prev company. I do ask my manager if i can use it to try a few things out and its fine but i will not put my credit card behind an account with unlimited cost risk (its limited probably but you know what i mean).
And its not even simple; Everything costs you money. Storing data, receiving data, pushing data, making api requests etc.
And what i find always quite surprising: How often people, even on hn, present simple file based apis where you can upload images and edit them or upload files and download them again or offering free services and that with AWS as a backend.
I just might be to long in this industry to see all those pitfalls of exploits and risks everywhere but i have the feeling that obvious respect against cloud service billing is neglected by most.