[mrb]

If your 15B queries are generated by 15B website visits monthly, your web properties should be generating tens of millions of dollars in monthly income. So a few thousand dollars is nothing.

Unless your traffic is non-revenue generating or somehow poorly monetizable...

[withinboredom]

> So a few thousand dollars is nothing.

In any business doing proper budgeting and trying to make a profit, a few thousands in UNEXPECTED costs, is huge. It can be the difference between your department having the money for new equipment, or begging for a budget increase because of unexpected costs to get new equipment.

[akira2501]

> a few thousands in UNEXPECTED costs, is huge.

It seems like the problem is expecting a fixed infrastructure budget while trying to create ever larger customer engagement. Is it just modern companies that don't realize you can't count your profits until you've got your AWS invoices for that month?

It's a fixed _overhead_ issue, not a fixed _budget_ issue.

[withinboredom]

You should be reserving those instances so it IS a FIXed cost, with very few exceptions.

[akira2501]

There are many AWS services for which you cannot make reservations. You can get better per unit rates by pre-purchasing, but even with instances, network transfer is a per unit factor.

Your only way out is the built in tools to limit service in these cases or to build your own circuit breakers and implement them, or make your usage so small as to not truly require the cloud in the first place.