Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by belter 1672 days ago
You can use Budgets Actions for that:

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws-cloud-financial-management/...

1 comments

Note that these are not instantaneous. You can still incur charges before the budget action kicks in and terminates your resources.
Ok so how would this work in any other way?

Should _every_ S3 action have a `if will_incur_charges() and should_not_incur_charges(): raise Exception()` statement in it's critical path? No, of course not. Everyone get's slower for nobodies benefit. It has to be delayed.

But then you run into an issue: what if you end up costing AWS 100$ before the budget action kicks in. Should you not pay that? Why not?

It’s a business decision on AWS’s part. If they want to reduce cognitive load or objection of some customers, they’ll be more willing to “eat it”.

My strong guess is if you had a free account, setup a budget cap, went over it, and they decided to charge you*, a quick email to support would get it waived.

I’m very much a fan of AWS, in part because while they have the chance to uphold the legal terms, my experience is that they’re pretty customer friendly.

* Early on, I had many bills under $1/mo that they just comped without me having to do anything.

> Should _every_ S3 action have a `if will_incur_charges() and should_not_incur_charges(): raise Exception()` statement in it's critical path?

Budget actions work by applying an Deny All to IAM, which has essentially exactly that.

The problem is not the shutting down, it's the detection. AWS billing has a resolution measured in hours, which has limited usefulness on a platform where you can rack up thousands of dollars in charges in just a few minutes.

> Should _every_ S3 action have a `if will_incur_charges() and should_not_incur_charges(): raise Exception()` statement in it's critical path?

We're talking about one account-wide flag `has_exceeded_billing_limits`. Changes are infrequent, and can be pushed into caches. Small overruns while the flag pushes are trivially eaten by AWS.

You claim that a bunch of GPU crypto minors won't exploit a chance to incur billing overruns if amazon waives charges?

The amazon deal is simple. Very clear pricing for pay what you use.

Cloudflare - can you link to the page where they show the cost of bandwidth? Still waiting.

True. But you can do it on forecasted costs.