[nucleardog]

> Amazon just needs to keep track of usage, and start rate limiting/returning 402s/blocking writes when the monthly limit is hit.

You're accruing costs even if you stop reading and writing. You're paying for the on-going storage, running of instances, etc.

What you're describing does not implement what you're describing it as.

E.g.,

It's the first day of the billing cycle, so our bill is effectively $0. So no limits in place on writing/rates/etc. We upload 100TB of data. No rate limiting or blocking because our current bill is under the $800 limit.

By about the 8th of the month, we've now hit the $800 limit you set. If you don't go hit the "let me exceed my billing limit" then you want Amazon to "stop the service".

You want:

  1. Under no circumstances to spend more than $800/mo.
  2. Your data to be retained.

This is not possible. There are two paths forward here:

  * Amazon retains your data: You need to continue paying for storage. Your bill at the end of the month will be ~$2200. Fails #1.
  * Amazon "stops the service" (storing your data) and under no circumstances exceeds $800/mo in charges: They delete your data. Fails #2.

You're asking for Amazon to provide you services and just not bill you for them if you don't want to pay for them. This isn't going to happen.

Alternatively, if you want them to not accept a write if it _would_ have led to you being over your budget, see my original comment about predicting the future.

[lupire]

You're twisting things. Amazon can alert you of the storage use and threaten to charge you in a few days, not a month. They can give you grace once per year so you're "on notice" after your first goof.

[nucleardog]

They... already do that.

Billing alerts take two seconds to set up in CloudWatch.

If it's a legitimate goof, contact support and they've refunded me every time.

Glad we're all on the same page then and there's no problem here.

Also interested to hear exactly what part of what I said was "twisting" or misrepresenting the issue.

[p1necone]

AWS doesn't run on a magical black box that eats customer money and spits out storage. They absolutely can eat some costs in a minority of cases in order to provide better service to customers (and I'm sure they already do in many other ways).

[nucleardog]

They are already quite willing to eat costs in cases of legitimate mistakes, compromised credentials, etc for the sake of customer service. I think I've worked with organizations at this point to have a couple hundred thousand dollars worth of bills refunded. The bulk of that was a single $110kUSD bill.

They provide billing estimates and billing data through CloudWatch metrics. This can be used to alert via SMS, email, and other methods. These can be used to trigger lambda functions to implement your own "shut it down" functionality quite easily in a way that actually makes sense for your workload.

What you seem to be advocating for is, more or less, a "pay what you want" model. If they're going to provide services and let you choose the maximum you're willing to pay and expect them to eat the rest, then I don't know how else to describe it.