[manigandham]

Of course they can be capped, you just turn off the services. If you're asking them to automate that for you, then the counterpoint would be people accidentally setting a budget that wipes out their resources and complaining about that.

Easier for both sides to just ask AWS for a refund if there's a reasonable case.

[nicoburns]

> the counterpoint would be people accidentally setting a budget that wipes out their resources and complaining about that.

This wouldn't be an issue if it was configurable.

[manigandham]

Mistakes will always be an issue. How you recover is more important.

Would you rather make a mistake leading to a big bill with the possibility of a refund or set your max budget and have your resources permanently deleted?

[nicoburns]

There would be no need to delete existing resources. Just prevent me from creating new ones until action is taken. For small projects in particular, I'd much rather have service taken offline and an email notification than even a $1000 bill. And $1000 is small in the scale of what you could end up with on AWS.

[manigandham]

It's the existing resources that are a problem because most of them have a steady-state cost.

EC2 instances, EBS volumes, S3 data... should AWS delete those when you hit your budget? How do you stop the billing otherwise?

[justinclift]

> How do you stop the billing otherwise?

With prioritisation, so the non-steady state services are stopped/killed with plenty of time to leave the needed foundations still running. :)

[manigandham]

1) If you're AT the budget amount then everything must be deleted to avoid going over.

2) If it's a soft budget then it's no different than the alarms you already have.

3) If you want to stop it before it hits the budget, then you're asking for a forecasted model with a non-deterministic point in time where things will be shutdown.

This just leads to neverending complexity and AWS doesn't want this liability. That's why they provide billing alarms and APIs so you can control what you spend.

[jfkebwjsbx]

Keeping those resources for a week but completely inaccessible would not be a huge cost for AWS yet a very big relief for startups.

[manigandham]

And this happens every time you go over budget? So it's a constant monthly emergency credit? Or extended free tier? Is there a dollar cap on that? What happens if you go over that?

Not so simple.

[dragonwriter]

> Of course they can be capped, you just turn off the services.

That's not a he's cap, since turning off services isn't instant and costs continue to accrue. But, yes, there are ways to mitigate the risk of uncapped costs and they are subject to automation.

[manigandham]

See the sibling comment thread. It's just not that simple. It creates a lot of liability, could lead to permanent data loss, and doesn't really prevent any mistakes either (just swaps them for mistakes in budget caps).

AWS would rather lose some billings than deal with the fallout of losing data or critical service for customers (and in turn their customers).

[thayne]

it depends on the use case. For example, I would like to have developer accounts with a fixed budget that developers can use to experiment with AWS services, but there isn't a great way to enforce that budget in AWS. In this case I don't really care about data loss, since it's all ephemeral testing infrastructure.

In theory I could build something using budget alarms, apis, and iam permissions to make sure everything gets shut down if a developer exceeds their budget, but if I made a mistake it could end up being very expensive. Not that I don't trust developers at my company to use such an account responsibly, but it is very easy to accidentally spend a lot of many on AWS, especially if you aren't an expert in it.

[manigandham]

So now we have another potential mistake - you setup a "delete everything/hard budget" for a production account instead of a developer account. What then?

It's impossible for AWS to know how to handle hard caps because there are too many ways to alter what's running and it's too contextual to your business at that moment. That's why they give you tools and calculators and pricing tables so that it's your responsibility (or a potential startup opportunity).

Money is easy to deal with. Alarms work. Bills can be negotiated. But you can't get back lost data, lost service, or lost customers.

[ngcc_hk]

Should be cap so you have a check. If your system does not allow threshold or assertion, please do not use it. If your cloud system do not have capped budget so you play in and alert you when you soon run out, do not use it.