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A comment on Tell HN: I DDoSed myself using CloudFront and Lambda Edge and got a $4.5k bill. Parent comment

Re:Tell HN: I DDoSed myself using CloudFront and Lambda Edge... by heretogetout on Tuesday June 28, 2022 @11:56AM (#31909358)
> Many people would enable it, forget about it, and footgun themselves on the other side.

Yeah, but I figure as long as Amazon doesn't immediately remove stored data, the damage of the footgun would be minimal. Speaking for myself, of course, I'd rather have a short outage than an unexpected thousand dollar overnight expense. It seems so trivial that it's unclear why AWS would not implement this feature. The only explanation that makes sense is that they want these surprise bills to occur.

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Re:Tell HN: I DDoSed myself using CloudFront and Lambda Edge... by bombcar on Tuesday June 28, 2022 @12:09PM (#31909540)
Because the downside for a company isn't "oh it was off overnight" it's "we finally hit it big and made zero sales because AWS shut us off".

Given how easily they reverse the bills, I suspect that they have a policy of doing it (perhaps a few times per account, something to prevent abuse) because they really don't want to trigger the above scenario.

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Re:Tell HN: I DDoSed myself using CloudFront and Lambda Edge... by heretogetout on Tuesday June 28, 2022 @12:20PM (#31909687)
Alternatively it's "we would have made a profit this month but a bug in this one service chewed through our budget in one hour". Sure, you might be able to get a refund, but that's no way to plan a business.
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