When will AWS, Azure or GCP support hard limit or prepaid accounts?

Cloud platforms like Azure, and AWS, and GCP provide new-user free tier accounts that help people get started in the cloud. They have no low-cost or capped offerings after that short period. They all expect you to move to uncapped fully metered pay-as-you-go services after that.

This makes it hard for data scientists, developers and architects is how to stay current and innovate without running the risk of financial catastrophe. 

I don't want to go bankrupt while experimenting

We're talking about relatively small non-production use cases.  The dollar limits on these could be capped to relatively small amounts.

I recently accidentally provisioned a dedicated Azure Event Hubs cluster that burned through my fixed $150 credit in 1 day.  The account ran up a $400 bill before Azure caught up and shut down the subscription. 


The hard cap meant I was dead to Azure for a month but not dead to my spouse for spending our mortgage payment.

After the time-limited free tier

The time-limited free tier is a great teaser for onboarding.  It rewards new users without providing anything to the people that are probably living in that ecosystem at work.

The forever free tier

Most of the cloud vendors provide some forever free services.  These are super valuable for training and prototyping.  Most of them provide a partial solution and have to be paired with uncapped pay-as-you-go.  We really need a capped or prepaid capability that lets us work with this tier fo services after the first year.

Today's offerings

Microsoft seems to be the only company that offers accounts that can be spending capped.  They just make it difficult to get them.
  • Microsoft bundles fixed amounts of Azure credits with their Visual Studio support packages.  Services turn off when those hard limits are reached giving the person a chance to tear down or change unexpectedly costly deployments. 
  • Microsoft also has a prepaid credit plan that is available only with certain license types.  Those licenses require third-party cloud provider actions making this a ridiculously complicated transaction in the age of direct-to-consumer operations


Cloud ProductDetails
Azure StandardMetered with no limits
Azure Open LicensePrepaid credits available - cost capped
 Services stop when credits consumed
 Complicated sign-up involving 3rd parties
Azure MSDNMonthly limits - cost capped
 Services stop when credits consumed
 Fixed amount based on bundle
 Only bundled with other services
GCPMetered with no limits
AWSMetered with no limits

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Installing the RNDIS driver on Windows 11 to use USB Raspberry Pi as network attached

Image
I do a lot of my development and configuration via ssh into my Raspberry Pi Zero over the RNDIS connection. Some models of the Raspberry PIs can be configured with  gadget drivers  that let the Raspberry pi emulate different devices when plugged into computers via USB. My favorite gadget  is the network profile that makes a Raspberry Pi look like an RNDIS-attached network device.  All types of network services travel over an RNDIS device without knowing it is a USB hardware connection. A Raspberry Pi shows up as a Remote NDIS (RNDIS) device when you plug the Pi into a PC or Mac via a USB cable. The gadget  in the Windows Device Manager picture shows this RNDIS Gadget connectivity between a Windows machine and a Raspberry Pi. The Problem Windows 11 and Windows 10 no longer auto-installs the RNDIS driver that makes magic happen. Windows recognizes that the Raspberry Pi is some type of generic USB COM device. Manually running W indows Update  or  Upd...
Read more

Understanding your WSL2 RAM and swap - Changing the default 50%-25%

Image
The Windows Subsystem for Linux operates as a virtual machine that can dynamically grow the amount of RAM to a maximum set at startup time.  Microsoft sets a default maximum RAM available to 50% of the physical memory and a swap-space that is 1/4 of the maximum WSL RAM.  You can scale those numbers up or down to allocate more or less RAM to the Linux instance. The first drawing shows the default WSL memory and swap space sizing. The images below show a developer machine that is running a dev environment in WSL2 and Docker Desktop.  Docker Desktop has two of its own WSL modules that need to be accounted for.  You can see that the memory would actually be oversubscribed, 3 x 50% if every VM used its maximum memory.  The actual amount of memory used is significantly smaller allowing every piece to fit. Click to Enlarge The second drawing shows the memory allocation on my 64GB laptop. WSL Linux defaul...
Read more

Almost PaaS Document Parsing with Tika and AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Image
The Apache Tika project provides a  library capable of parsing and extracting data and meta data from over 1000 file types.  Tika is available as a single jar file that can be included inside applications or as a deployable jar file that runs Tika as a standalone service. This blog describes deploying the Tika jar as an auto-scale service in Amazon AWS Elastic Beanstalk.  I selected Elastic Beanstalk because it supports jar based deployments without any real Infrastructure configuration. Elastic Beanstalk auto-scale should take care of scaling up and down for for the number of requests you get. Tika parses documents and extracts their text completely in memory. Tika was deployed for this blog using EC2 t2.micro instances available in the AWS free tier. t2.micro VMs are 1GB which means that you are restricted in document complexity and size. You would size your instances appropriately for your largest documents.   Preconditions An AWS account. AWS ac...
Read more