Ask HN: Experience with AWS goodwill in case of self-inflicted high bills

[henriklippke]

Do you have experiences with high AWS bills due to your own mistakes?

For example, I have generated a 4000$ bill within 24 hours by an AWS Lambda function reading a row from a DynamoDB table and then called itself again using an EventBridge event ;( And that with a concurrency of 300 and so I quickly reached the 4000$ within a few hours.

I immediately opened a support ticket, but it's been 4 weeks now and it seems nobody can or wants to help me.

What are your experiences?

[huksley]

I had similar case and it was handled very quickly, consider making a better ticket with explanation, actions you performed to stop accumulating costs and future steps to prevent same kind of problem from happening.

[Havoc]

Ah recursion and serverless. A classic big cloud footgun

[akira2501 → Havoc]

Well.. I created a fork bomb on AWS Lambda. It was supposed to check a condition before self executing with a new payload, but the check was borked, so it just always self executed.

It turns out, if you do this _directly_, and not through a second service like Event Bridge, AWS will notice this fact, and will just suspend your lambda for a few minutes until all the executions die out.

It was only a $20 mistake in the end.

The real nightmare with Event Bridge is the default "retry" threshold is 185 times. It's a nuclear level nightmare. I just use the cron part now.

[4878241143]

First step is pro-actively calling them and speaking to a human.

It does happen but you need to be pro-active and not waiting on a reply to a ticket.

I can imagine that ticket slowly sinking to the bottom of the pile as nobody wants to take that on or make that decision, especially in writing!

[QuinnyPig]

Odds are great the first time it happens. Past that it doesn’t generally go so well.

[KomoD → QuinnyPig]

This guy knows AWS

[arno1]

Akash Network is your next stop ;)