[_flux]

Should they simply automatically eat the costs then it would undoubtedly result in abuse. Just look at GitHub Actions.

Oh I didn't think I was starting 1000 instances of miners in the EC2 GPU cloud, it certainly exceeded my configured budget, please give my money back..

[mytherin]

"You can only launch 1 concurrent EC2 instance per $100 on your max cap, if you want to launch 1000 instances of EC2 your max cap needs to be set to at least $100.000, or to $unlimited".

There are many solutions to this problem to prevent abuse. All of which are way better for consumers than the status quo of everybody having an $unlimited spending limit.

[yorwba]

That's where "if the costs become exorbitant, Amazon is in a better position to improve their own systems to reduce the amount of overages that people run into in practice" comes in.

If starting 1000 instances exceeds your configured budget, they could simply not start them, and shut down whatever number of instances you managed to start as soon as their cost exceeds the budget.

[_flux]

I guess the question is how precise monitoring and reactionary system Amazon wants build for this, for an arguably marginal use case anyway; they do already provide Amazon Budgets for automatic actions when exceeding budgets, but it's quite not as real-time. And then making the niche cases favor the customer is an invitation to abuse.

But least all Amazon accounts are tied to a credit card, so abusing in a scale similar to e.g. the GitHub case is not that easy.

[onion2k]

It's trivial to add a clause that says "If you add a cap to the cost of your account you can only have 3 concurrent instances."

[stefan_]

Don't give your customers unlimited margin and leverage then. See also: Archegos.

[sneak]

> Oh I didn't think I was starting 1000 instances of miners in the EC2 GPU cloud, it certainly exceeded my configured budget, please give my money back..

All AWS accounts start off without the ability to do this (via the quota system) and being able to start 1000 ec2 instances of any type is a setting that needs to be unlocked via a support request (which can never be done by that support person, but always needs to be escalated to the "service team" and takes about 1 business day).