[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.

[manigandham]

It's really not that complicated... to watch your own spend. But yet everyone here keeps running into issues, and that's just with your own projects. I'm sure you can at least appreciate the complexities involved at the scale of AWS where even the minority use-cases matter.

"Everything except for persistent storage" is nowhere near useful enough to work and can cause catastrophic losses. Wipe local disks? What about bandwidth? Shutdown Cloudfront and Lambda? What about queues and SNS topics? What about costs that are inseparable from storage like Kinesis, Redshift, and RDS? Delete all those too? And as I said before, what happens if you set a budget and AWS takes your service down which affects your customers?

It's easy to say it's simple in an HN comment. It's entirely different when you need to implement it at massive scale and that's before even talking about legal and accounting issues. There's a reason why AWS doesn't offer it.

[mewpmewp2]

Just shut down everything, but don't delete existing data written to disks. That can cover a wide array of budget problems. If you set a budget like that you really do not want to go over it and any potential loss from customers is not as huge as going over that budget. At least have that option.

I sometimes for example fiddle with Google APIs. I do not even have customers so don't really care if things will stop working, but I have accidentally spent 100 euros or more. I have alerts, but those alerts arrived way too late.

I make a loop mistake in my code and now I suddenly owe 100 euros...

[manigandham]

> "Just shut down everything, but don't delete existing data written to disks."

I literally just explained why this doesn't work with AWS services. You will have data loss.

And it creates a whole new class of mistakes. If people mistakenly overspend then they'll mistakenly delete their resources too. All these complaints that AWS should cover their billing will then be multiplied by complaints that AWS should recover their infrastructure. No cloud vendor wants that liability.