Why to be careful in using AWS

[Project 2501]

Panos Ipeirotis is a familar name to many of us. He runs a blog and has used Mturk many times in the past. He was the one that reported that Mturk was full of scam hits to the media. In this case, he made a mistake in setting up a hit that could have cost him thousands of dollars.

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise...ll-in-minutes/

When Panos Ipeirotis checked his Amazon Web Services bill last week, he started to sweat. It was $1,177.76 — much more than he’d ever been charged before — and it was going up another $50 to $100 with each passing hour. He had no idea why.

Ipeirotis, an information operations professor at New York University, had created a pretty unusual spreadsheet. As part of an experiment in how to use crowdsourcing to generate descriptions of images, he had posted thumbnails of 25,000 pictures into a Google document, and then he invited people to describe the images. The problem was that these thumbnails linked back to original images stored on Amazon’s S3 storage service, and apparently, Google’s servers went slightly bonkers. “Google just very aggressively grabbed the images from Amazon again and again and again,” he says.
Soon Google had sucked nearly nine terabits of bandwidth from Ipeirotis’ Amazon storage servers. And bandwidth like that costs money.


Lucky for Ipeirotis, Amazon forgave the charges after he explained what had happened.
Ipeirotis would call it a denial of service attack, except for the fact that Amazon’s cloud scales up to meet demand. But the attack did deny him money. At least for a little while.

His full story can be found on his blog.

http://www.behind-the-enemy-lines.co...-attacked.html

[nab911]

Ouch. That is why being a pioneer can be a dangerous thing. I had a similar experience when my company was paying for low budget website hosting and I ran a groupon on. The amount of traffic we received in one day shot us over 2 times our max bandwith and they charged us an extra $200.

[thadius856]

It's easy to forget that bandwidth isn't free because we get so conditioned to "unlimited" plans at home and on our mobile devices.