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by ashug 871 days ago
This is an interesting point, and we could definitely consider something like this. Where exactly do you run into problems?

For example, let's say you've figured out that a particular EC2 instance or database is too costly. What is the sticking point for you in turning it off? Is it that the resource has other essential functions unrelated to the cost spike? Or is it the identification of the exact resource that's the problem?
1 comments
ericb 870 days ago
When we evolved to SSO and subaccounts with various roles/access, there were resources running/used by different accounts. I would see the instance in the costs. But then, I'd try and find that instance, started by another dev, and get access to shut if off. And even though I'm the main account owner--which to me, means I should be able to nuke whatever, since I pay the bills, I always had trouble getting to it, and getting the permissions for what I wanted.

I used Vantage, which helped me see the problem, but then taking action on it was traumatic.

The barriers are:

- who owns it?

- what service is it in (if it is logs, for example)?

- where is the screen it is on?

- how do I get the permissions to kill it?

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ashug 870 days ago
Makes a lot of sense - in my opinion AWS doesn't do the best job with this. We had a similar problem with EKS where even as the root user I couldn't view cluster details (https://medium.com/@elliotgraebert/comparing-the-top-eight-m....).

I agree that this would be a great feature. To be honest, our product isn't currently focused on this sort of automatic management of resource lifecycle; we're much better at data collection. But thank you for flagging this! We'll definitely keep it in mind as we add support for compute services (right now we only support S3 and there's nothing to "spin down").

Edit: The part less related to permissions (how can I kill it) and more related to discoverability (which resource is it) is more adjacent to what we've already built and is something we can take a look at soon. Perhaps we can take a crack at the permissions aspect afterwards.

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