Does AWS CloudFront stop working after I breach FreeTier limits - amazon-web-services

I am using AWS CloudFront and I'm currently free-tier.
I am close to going over 2.000.000 HTTP/S requests that is max allowed for free-tier.
Will AWS automatically charge me for the traffic that goes over those 2.000.000 requests (per on-demand prices) or will CloudFront become unavailable and stop receiving more requests? How do I upgrade to on-demand?

Cloudfront will still be available, however, you will be charged requests for over the max allowed free tiers.

Yes AWS will automatically charge for any excess usage over the free tier quota. Any resource you created in your account will not affect and they will work without any interruption. You do not need to do any upgrades from your side to cater to increased requests.
If you are budget concerned, you can create AWS Budget and create an alert so AWS will notify you before you reach a pre-defined budget. From there you can also define what to do if you reach the budget. For example, you can shut down ec2 instances if this resource consumed more than the allocated budget.

Related

How to limit number of reads from Amazon S3 bucket

I'm hosting a static website in Amazon S3 with CloudFront. Is there a way to set a limit for how many reads (for example per month) will be allowed for my Amazon S3 bucket in order to make sure I don't go above my allocated budget?
If you are concerned about going over a budget, I would recommend Creating a Billing Alarm to Monitor Your Estimated AWS Charges.
AWS is designed for large-scale organizations that care more about providing a reliable service to customers than staying within a particular budget. For example, if their allocated budget was fully consumed, they would not want to stop providing services to their customers. They might, however, want to tweak their infrastructure to reduce costs in future, such as changing the Price Class for a CloudFront Distribution or using AWS WAF to prevent bots from consuming too much traffic.
Your static website will be rather low-cost. The biggest factor will likely be Data Transfer rather than charges for Requests. Changing the Price Class should assist with this. However, the only true way to stop accumulating Data Transfer charges is to stop serving content.
You could activate CloudTrail data read events for the bucket, create a CloudWatch Event Rule to trigger an AWS Lambda Function that increments the number of reads per object in an Amazon DynamoDB table and restrict access to the objects once a certain number of reads has been reached.
What you're asking for is a very typical question in AWS. Unfortunately with near infinite scale, comes near infinite spend.
While you can put a WAF, that is actually meant for security rather than scale restrictions. From a cost-perspective, I'd be more worried about the bandwidth charges than I would be able S3 requests cost.
Plus once you put things like Cloudfront or Lambda, it gets hard to limit all this down.
The best way to limit, is to put Billing Alerts on your account -- and you can tier them, so you get a $10, $20, $100 alerts, up until the point you're uncomfortable with. And then either manually disable the website -- or setup a lambda function to disable it for you.

aws notifications for data transfer costs

I am using an ec2 linux instance on aws, I am trying to stay inside the Free Usage Tier, but today I have noticed a charge for DataTransfer cost in Billing Management.
I don't know what the limits for DataTransfer are but I'm using aws for the host of a telegram bot
I would like to stay within the limits of the Free Usage Tier, is there a way to receive notifications just before exceeding the limit for data transfers or simply setting a limit not to be exceeded?
You can set up billing alerts, at any dollar amount you want, but keep in mind that if your service is getting slammed with requests, your account will still keep accumulating charges even after the alert is sent out - so depending on how long it takes you to respond to the alert (and turn off services for example), and how fast services are being consumed, you may still end up with an unexpected bill.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/monitor_estimated_charges_with_cloudwatch.html

AWS Cloudfront Prevent Denial of Wallet?

How can I prevent Denial of Wallet attacks against AWS Cloudfront?
Here's my specific situation: I have a Cloudfront distribution where Lambda#Edge functions serve web pages and API requests for my application. I need to rate-limit requests made to Cloudfront based on the IP address of the user. Without any kind of rate-limiting in place, it's possible for a malicious user to make millions of slow requests to the distribution that wouldn't be blocked by AWS's DDOS protections and which would lead to significant charges. This is especially important here since Lambda#Edge functions cost 3x as much as ordinary Lambda functions and don't come with a free tier.
It seemed practical to use AWS WAF in order to accomplish this. However, I recently found out that WAF charges for all incoming requests, regardless of if they are blocked or not. So a Denial of Wallet attack would still be possible here.
Is there a method or a general strategy that I can implement here that doesn't involve AWS WAF?
The limits need to be very tight. Even paying $50 per month for malicious requests would be considered too high.
AWS Shield Standard is free when you use Cloudfront and it automatically protects against common DDoS attacks. Source
If you want to use WAF to tighten the requests to your Lambda, you can setup caching for HTTP 403 responses in Cloudfront, so the attacker won't get their request past the Cloudfront cache.
You have to decide which one is on priority for you, your service being down or your bill going above your budget? If it's the first one, you can use WAF and AWS Shield Advanced.
If it's the second one, you can implement a request throttling method. For example, you can make use of incoming requests to EC2 instances are free. So you can implement a queue in a free tier EC2 instance that forwards the requests to your Lambda but drops the requests when the rate is higher than a defined threshold. Keep in mind that you get charged for outgoing requests from EC2 to your Lambda Edge.
OR you can implement another Lambda function before your Lambda Edge to keep track of which IP address sent how many requests. If it's past the threshold, respond with HTTP 403 and have that cached in Cloudfront. Then the next request from that IP address won't reach your Lambda. But again, keep in mind that you'll get charged for this additional Lambda.
The last resort is creating a billing alarm that notifies you when monthly charges reach $50 so that you can stop the costs before it goes high.
AWS Shield Advanced includes DDoS cost protection, a safeguard from scaling charges as a result of a DDoS attack that causes usage spikes on protected Amazon EC2, Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), Amazon CloudFront, AWS Global Accelerator, or Amazon Route 53. If any of the AWS Shield Advanced protected resources scale up in response to a DDoS attack, you can request credits via the regular AWS Support channel.
Please note that, at the time of writing, this service involves a monthly fee of $3,000 per account, plus data transfer fees starting at $0.050 per GB.

How to prevent spamming of AWS cloud front?

I am learning AWS , and came across hosting static websites using Amazon S3 and distributing to edge locations using Cloud Front and Route53.
I know that for Cloud front we pay for what we use. So my monthly bill will reflect the number of requests I get once the free tier is over.
My question is what if a hacker or someone sends a lots of requests like spamming, then will I be charged higher?
How to prevent this and does AWS has any security measures like limiting the number of requests to serve per minute or something for this ?
Pardon me if my question is very basic. I am just learning . Thanks
My question is what if a hacker or someone sends a lots of requests like spamming, then will I be charged higher?
Yes. You are charged a per-request price, as well as data transfer charges. The per-request charges are relatively low, but if they find a large file to download they can quickly run up the bandwidth charge.
does AWS has any security measures like limiting the number of requests to serve per minute or something for this ?
Yes, you want WAF, the Web Application Firewall. With it you can configure a rate-limited rule that will block an IP address after N requests within a five-minute period.
As I know you pay for Caches Invalidations on AWS but not for a number of requests done to your CloudFront distributions.

Using AWS budgets to stop a services

I am currently signed up to the free tier of AWS. I am enjoying experimenting with various services including those not affording by said free tier. Can AWS's enhanced budgets be used to stop services like EC2 instances if I accidentally spend too much? Or do they merely act as alerts?
This is available for EC2, I don't think it is available for all of the AWS resources.
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/UsingAlarmActions.html
Hope it helps.
There are several posts which looks it from different perspectives, such as this and this.
Having a cost cap might be a crucial requirement based on the usage, especially when considering how complex it is to set the things up properly and keeping everything secure on the cloud for an average user. At least we can expect to have a feature to switch on/off a cost-cap service, so a user can decide their own scenario easily.
Closest solution that I found is here:
Serverless Automated Cost Controls
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/serverless-automated-cost-controls-part1
It explains how to trigger AWS Lambda function to change IAM permission from EC2FullAccess to EC2ReadOnly when the budget exceeds the limit.
There is no built-in way to terminate services based on budgets or billing alarms.
You can get notified automatically, but it is then up to you to determine how to handle it.
Would you really want AWS automatically terminating your production infrastructure because you went $1 over your estimated monthly spending?
Edit: There is now a way to monitor and alert on free tier usage, and when your predicted usage will exceed the free tier. See here for details. You could probably come up with a way to terminate infrastructure based on an alert using SNS & lambda.
Edit 2: In Oct. 2020, AWS released Budget Actions - the ability to trigger an action when a budget thresholds are reached. This should give you the ability to automate a response - you can shut down servers, change IAM permissions to prevent additional infrastructure from being created, etc.
Recently, Amazon has given "budget action" to carry out actions like stop services automatically if the budget has exceeded.
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/10/announcing-aws-budgets-actions/
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2/budgets-controls.html#:~:text=select%20Configure%20thresholds.-,To%20configure%20a%20budget%20action,-Under%20Configure%20thresholds