> “oops" away large sums of money on AWS, and for the most part they seem to have at least gotten a partial discount when they contacted customer support
As a counter-datapoint, we accidentally left a Redshift cluster up idling for two weeks before we started getting alerts, and after numerous attempts have failed to get compensated in any way. The reasoning was that, well, it was what we requested and they had to allocate compute power to it (which we didn’t use).
All in all a very frustrating experience and it makes me fairly cynical of all these “I got my money back without problems!” comments.
(For what it’s worth, it was about $4k of costs which was a lot for us at the time)
It's also unnecessary. Give users cost controls, then you won't need the current mess of hoping support will write off $$$ of mistakes. With a risk of bankrupting a small shop if support doesn't help it drives risk averse users towards less dynamic offerings.
Isn't AWS supposed to focus on the virtuous cycle of saving customers money (or at least reducing AWS supports need to write off customer mistakes)?
I always have the feeling of a bit of “randomness” with these kinds of compensations. It makes sense, as it’s difficult to “codify” these types of things, lest they get abused and you might as well just lower your prices at that point.
AWS is a large organization; I believe this type of stuff highly depends upon your “entrance” into the organization, i.e. the account manager. We were probably just unlucky with our Redshift troubles, but it did eventually trigger a move to Google Cloud / Bigquery, as the pay-as-you-go method seemed a bit safer (although it’s still too difficult imho to accurately estimate the costs of queries).
As a counter-datapoint, we accidentally left a Redshift cluster up idling for two weeks before we started getting alerts, and after numerous attempts have failed to get compensated in any way. The reasoning was that, well, it was what we requested and they had to allocate compute power to it (which we didn’t use).
All in all a very frustrating experience and it makes me fairly cynical of all these “I got my money back without problems!” comments.
(For what it’s worth, it was about $4k of costs which was a lot for us at the time)