Both AWS and shared hosting providers run on a “F you. Pay me!” model. The difference is that small hosting resellers knew they couldn’t collect on debts while Amazon knows it can.
Even if not realtime, it sounds like a better option than AWS' current "not supported at all; you'll have to manually shut things down if costs overrun".
AWS sorta has something like this already with CloudWatch, but it'd be nice if it was simpler and immediate instead of reactive. I just run a little reserved EC2 instance so my main billing risks are excessive data out or forgetting to renew a reservation and reverting to by-the-hour billing. So that I don't worry about it much I have three alarms that notify me if either "estimated charges > $x for 1 datapoints within 6 hours", or there's "anomalous" NetworkOut over a day, or "there's more than X total NetworkOut over a day", and another alarm that's "NetworkOut > Y for 1 datapoint within 15 minutes" that notifies me and shuts the instance down. I'd like to have a hard cap of "my instantaneous billing running total for the month, not my 'estimate', has exceeded $x, shut everything down" but what's there is something.
I use AWS for a very small side project. I used about $10 back in July, and I don't expect any more costs for several months (aside from S3 hosting).
It would be really nice if I could preload $100 into the account and remove my credit card. I don't have ANYTHING sensitive behind my username and password- except my CC #
I know they are never going to implement this because I'm small potatoes, but it would be nice
For data out I have some alerts set similar to yours to shut down the instance if NetworkOut becomes unusually high—over three different time scales. Since the alerts are delayed, though, I also set up traffic shaping rules in the VM to throttle the NetworkOut to something reasonable so that it doesn't incur a huge bill before the first alert triggers. Officially the VMs have 5 Gbps network links; at that rate you can accumulate quite a large bill in a very short time if the VM starts saturating the link.
I came here to basically say something like this: if there's a hard limit, your business will basically shut down entirely. It's hard (impossible) for cloud providers to automagically shut down services based on each customer's priorities.
I don't think there's a magical solution to this. There might be a company that sets a $1K USD/month limit, forgets about it, and suddenly the cloud provider shuts down everything a year later, while "everyone" is unavailable or something like that.
There are so many scenarios, and I honestly feel that the cloud providers have decided on the most fool-proof solution both for them and their clients.
Ok. But the Auto Scaling Groups are free - so I can keep that on, right? Oh, look! They just launched more EV2s, how convenient. Should I back these up to S3? With CRR enabled?