[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.

[ghaff]

It's not an unreasonable use case to just nuke everything if your spend exceeds some level. (I'm just playing around and want to set some minimal budget.) But, yes, implement that and you will see a post on here at some point about how my startup had a usage spike/we made a simple mistake and AWS wiped out everything so we had to close up shop.

ADDED: A lot of people seem to think it's a simple matter of a spending limit. Which implies that a cloud provider can easily decide:

1.) How badly you care about not exceeding a spending threshold at all

2.) How much you care about persistent storage and services directly related to persistent storage

3.) What is reasonable from a user's perspective to simply shutdown on short notice

[Dylan16807]

Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. In so many use cases, shutting off everything except storage would do a good job. And the cloud provider doesn't have to decide anything. It's a simple matter of setting a spending limit with specified semantics. A magic "do what I want" spending limit is not necessary.