Beware Scaling on AWS in Early Days
During my first month on AWS, I used AWS Batch a lot.
AWS decided to bill me mid-month (for more than I utilized I should add) even though the cycle ends on the 31st.
The transaction failed. Instead of contacting me to resolve the issue, AWS completely locked me out of the account. Card is also now locked due to "fraud."
I've been trying to resolve this for a week now (closer to 3 weeks if you include quota-related tickets). It's Friday, and I have a demo with a Fortune 100 company next week. In order to get results for this demo, I need to run a lot of Batch jobs - not great.
I shudder to think about what would happened if this had been a launch with paid customers.
From their perspective, I get that crypto miners probably sign up and cancel their credit cards, but I was just using the cloud as intended. I had multiple tickets related to resource quotas that explained why I was using the cloud.
You should really tell us who you are and your support ticket numbers, you are on the hacker news frontpage complaining about a digital service provider (support) failure, which means you are eligible for free premium support. At least this works for cloudflare, where it goes like „hi this is the cloudflare CTO, I will personally take care of this, this shouldn‘t have happened OwO“.
> The transaction failed.
Why? What would have been different half a month later?
> for more than I utilized I should add
Do you have details?
+1 to this sentiment. You'll also run into similar problems if you need to request quota increases. For companies that AWS takes seriously they'll approve the requests in a few minutes. For startups they'll literally take days reviewing the request before some random person at AWS decides whether to increase your limit or not.
> The transaction failed.
Why did it fail?
> AWS decided to bill me mid-month (for more than I utilized I should add) even though the cycle ends on the 31st.
There are specific items that are billed immediately, such as domain registrations.
This is the type of stuff that keeps me using smaller cloud providers. Even medium sized companies don't need the scalability and flexibility of a full cloud offering like AWS (for the most part).
How are you going to fix it? Create a second account? Azure/GCP?
Tell HN: