I’m just a lowly dev and don’t have experience with seeing the bills from cloud providers for a whole org.
Can you (or someone) shed some light to help me understand how this would ramp up to millions? Both for curiosity’s sake, and to make sure my self-deployed projects (0 AI, all manually configured) don’t bankrupt me.
AWS bandwidth is expensive as fuck. I think they're still pricing as $0.09 per GB?
Real wholesale bandwidth pricing is about a hundred times cheaper than that, and incoming bandwidth is often free. You could rent a server with 100Gbps connection, 10000TB/month outgoings cap (maybe), and have the AI spam packets to it, and mostly not reply to them. It would be expensive but not nearly as expensive as it would be for the guy on AWS.
Do some calculations: 100Gbps is 12.5 GBps which is about one dollar per second. Okay so maybe not millions of dollars but still a hundred thousand per day, while you are spending maybe 1000-3000 per month and cancelling after the first month.
> Real wholesale bandwidth pricing is about a hundred times cheaper than that.
It is alsi worth mentioning that it is just billed different. You either pay per port (and can use entire bandwidth) or per 95th percentile of the monthly speed usage. So if your traffic isn't spiky but consistent, you'd pay even less than "hundred times cheaper".
Excluding server costs, having that 100Gbps on egress can cost $50k a day. since it's a very high-margin product, AWS support would probably refund or reduce that to hundreds. Not sure how you get to millions either.
Why would AWS refund 100Gbps on egress since the account actively used that bandwidth? AWS would not know if this is legitimate traffic, a (D)DoS or whatever...
At most I think you could negotiate CloudFront rates, but even then, the sob story would be if you had been DDoSed and got hit with this traffic and AWS failed to protect you from this attack. Actively creating the outbound traffic is something that I don't see how AWS would be sympathetic to providing any refunds.
AWS is known for refunding or partially refunding people if they accidentally rack up a huge bill in a short amount of time. They even reduce the bill in this case. (I do think reducing a bill in the tens of thousands to hundreds is unlikely though)
I mean if this story is to be believed, AWS reduced the bill from 6500 to 1800.
I think developers accidentally racking up unexpected thousands in costs on their first AWS project is a pretty common phenomenon that their support has standard rules for handling.
I do think the discount is believable, but we don't know the line items AWS applied a discount/removed charges.
The developer said the agent deployed multiple CloudFormation templates, I'd bet that AWS waived the charges for the unused resources - like EC2 instances that were idle most of the time, very high margin SKUs, etc.
Now, for 100 Gbps of egress (which didn't actually happen) - and this is grounded speculation - I don't think that AWS would give a discount that is greater than CloudFront rates.
100 Gbps is A LOT of data.