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by karmasimida 1904 days ago
How is this going to be implemented?

When it reach the cap, all your service stop working? This is incredibly user hostile.

If you want some warning when utilization is high, it can be relatively easy to setup with AWS's existing feature, but you need to do some configuration/tweaking on your own.

4 comments

When it reach the cap, all your service stop working? This is incredibly user hostile.

Not nearly as user hostile as the possibility of an unexpected DOS on your bank account while you're asleep.

Which has actually happened to people.

My experience is just one data point but:

My expertise is not at all anything related to web development so when I first tried experimenting with AWS for a side project I was terrified. It was an experiment for me and i didn't care if it deleted the data since the data it was storing was test data I was uploading. However, my budget for my entire side project was $500 and it seemed totally feasible (at least to a first time user of such a service) that some wrong lines in the code could balloon the requests or storage I made. At the time, I didn't even have $5000 of liquid assets and it would have been a nightmare.

That would be substantively less user hostile to me than a massive bill on a personal project, which is easy to see occurring for any number of reasons.
> When it reach the cap, all your service stop working? This is incredibly user hostile.

So set your cap to a very high number, much higher than any amount you expect to be billed. Surely for everyone there is some number at which they would rather their services go down, than have to pay it?

> When it reach the cap, all your service stop working?

That exactly what I would like to have. Services stop and I get time to review what's happened without any stress that my bank account will be emptied.

AWS has both big/small customers, I would say those two have very different priorities when it comes to SLA.

Having a killer switch that could make one's AWS account stop would be a risk for big customers, I would predict, if it is misconfigured, maybe even intentionally. A better solution for them would be alerts, and get things right afterwards.

It will be of course possible to disable that for customers who wish so.