[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.

[Dylan16807]

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

Not if I'm busy, or away from work, or asleep. There is a massive difference between getting an alarm (which is probably delayed because AWS is so bad at reporting spent money) versus having low priority servers immediately cut.

Even without a priority system, shutting down all active servers would be a huge improvement over just a warning in many situations.

[manigandham]

That's not a soft budget then, so which option is it? 1 or 3?

You want it to selectively turn off only EC2? Does it matter which instance and in which order? What if you're not running EC2 and it's other services? Is there a global priority list of all AWS services? Is it ranked by what's costing you the most? Do you want to maintain your own priority of services?

And what if the budget was a mistake and now you lost customers because your service went down? Do you still blame AWS for that? Or would you rather have the extra bill?

There is no easy solution.

[plorkyeran]

It's really not that complicated. "Stop paying for everything except for persistent storage" is sufficient for the majority of use-cases where a soft cap would be appropriate. When you need to do anything fancier, you can just continue to use alarms as you do now. A tool does not have to solve every problem that might ever exist to be useful.

[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.