Run your own high-end cloud gaming service on EC2 (2015)

Re:Run your own high-end cloud gaming service on EC2 (2015) by smartsystems on Sunday February 09, 2020 @02:48PM (#22283949)

Yeah, do not do this. You'll end up with a $1000 bill from Amazon becuase you forgot to shut it down and discover very quickly they don't care at all once they already have your money.

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Re:Run your own high-end cloud gaming service on EC2 (2015) by scarecrowbob on Sunday February 09, 2020 @03:11PM (#22284042)

FWIW, I did that once for an unrelated project and they ate the 1200 bill for a running EC2.

I dunno if they'd eat that cost again, and I wouldn't try it on purpose.

But keep in mind that they have an incentive to do this: it's the cost of acquiring users without scaring them about a possibly humongous bill.

I now have better billing alarms set.

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Re:Run your own high-end cloud gaming service on EC2 (2015) by Bombthecat on Sunday February 09, 2020 @03:17PM (#22284073)

They should just add an "shutdown at cost x option" for private users at least..

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Re:Run your own high-end cloud gaming service on EC2 (2015) by awinder on Sunday February 09, 2020 @03:36PM (#22284148)

https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/tutorials/control-you...

Under section 4, anyone can set up an aws cost budget

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Re:Run your own high-end cloud gaming service on EC2 (2015) by arianestrasse on Sunday February 09, 2020 @03:43PM (#22284184)

Yes, you can set up a budget but it's only used for alerting. The services will happily keep running and building up to that 1k bill if you miss the alerts or don't react to them.

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Re:Run your own high-end cloud gaming service on EC2 (2015) by thaeli on Sunday February 09, 2020 @04:37PM (#22284486)

Those alerts can invoke a Lambda that shuts the service down, which is a ridiculously baroque solution but it's what you get.

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Re:Run your own high-end cloud gaming service on EC2 (2015) by arianestrasse on Sunday February 09, 2020 @05:28PM (#22284755)

Wow, they really made it complex, didn't they? On one hand they advertise how anyone can spin up a VM and connect to it but you still need to do some serverless black magic to keep your budget in check. Anyway, thanks for the heads up. I'll definitely try that out.

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Re:Run your own high-end cloud gaming service on EC2 (2015) by shoo on Monday February 10, 2020 @07:30AM (#22288518)

The aim of the game is for you to be depending on even more AWS services to help you use the ones you already have

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Re:Run your own high-end cloud gaming service on EC2 (2015) by thephyber on Sunday February 09, 2020 @11:48PM (#22286493)

> ridiculously baroque solution

It seems to follow their practice of building the “API first” solution. By the way, a lambda/programmatic solution allows you to disable lower priority resources and retain higher priority resources. It’s a lot of effort, but it’s incredibly flexible.

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Re:Run your own high-end cloud gaming service on EC2 (2015) by luhn on Monday February 10, 2020 @11:45AM (#22290717)

Additionally billing alarms have a max precision of a day, so if you manage to really screw up you can rack up a huge bill before the alarm goes off.

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Re:Run your own high-end cloud gaming service on EC2 (2015) by nostrebored on Sunday February 09, 2020 @03:42PM (#22284175)

You can set up billing alarms with thresholds which send you sms/email alerts

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Re:Run your own high-end cloud gaming service on EC2 (2015) by scarecrowbob on Sunday February 09, 2020 @06:34PM (#22285104)

Yeah, that's not a terrible idea. But I work with tools that could, like, cut my thumbs off... I feel like this is still pretty nerfed up by comparison.

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Re:Run your own high-end cloud gaming service on EC2 (2015) by wnevets on Sunday February 09, 2020 @06:28PM (#22285069)

>and discover very quickly they don't care at all once they already have your money.

That hasn't been my experience with AWS but then again it has been years since I allowed such a thing to happen.

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Re:Run your own high-end cloud gaming service on EC2 (2015) by phendrenad2 on Sunday February 09, 2020 @08:07PM (#22285574)

Setting up a CloudWatch alert to email you when the bill goes over $10 in 6 hours is a good measure (of course you probably won't get the alert for 24 hours because of Amazon's billing update delay).

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