[lucianbr]

> Do you think that this is trivial at AWS scale?

What a ridiculous point. AWS achieves non-trivial things at scale all the time, and brag about it too.

So many smart engineers with high salaries and they can't figure out a solution like "shut down instances so costs don't continue to grow, but keep the data so nothing critical is lost, at least for a limited time"?

Disingenuous is what you are writing - oh no, it's a hard problem, they can't be expected to even try to solve it.

[scott_w]

> What a ridiculous point. AWS achieves non-trivial things at scale all the time, and brag about it too.

Many companies achieve non-trivial things at scale. Pretty much every good engineer I speak to will list out all the incredibly challenging thing they did. And follow it up with "however, this component in Billing is 100x more difficult than that!"

I've worked in Billing and I'd say a huge number of issues come from the business logic. When you add a feature after-the-fact, you'll find a lot of technical and business blockers that prevent you doing the most obvious path. I strongly suspect AWS realised they passed this point of no return some time ago and now the effort to implement it vastly outweighs any return they'd ever hope to see.

And, let's be honest, there will be no possible implementation of this that will satisfy even a significant minority of the people demanding this feature. Everyone things they're saying the same thing but the second you dig into the detail and the use-case, everyone will expect something slightly (but critically) different.

[lucianbr]

> "however, this component in Billing is 100x more difficult than that!"

Simply claiming this does not make it true. Anyway, the original claim was simply that it is not trivial. This is what is known as moving the goalposts, look it up.

> let's be honest, there will be no possible implementation of this

Prefixing some assertion with "let's be honest" does not prove it or even support it in any way. If you don't have any actual supporting arguments, there's nothing to discuss, to be honest.

[scott_w]

> Simply claiming this does not make it true.

The people "claiming" this actually worked on it. I read a post from HN just yesterday talking about the complexities of billing. Look it up.

> If you don't have any actual supporting arguments

You can read other responses in this post. Look it up.

[benterix]

> Disingenuous is what you are writing - oh no, it's a hard problem, they can't be expected to even try to solve it.

I find it funny people bring this pseudo-argument up whenever this issue is discussed. Customers: "We want A, it's crucial for us". People on the Internet: "Do you have any idea how difficult is to implement A? How would it work?" And the discussion diverges into technical details obscuring the main point: AWS is bent on on never implementing this feature even though in the past (that is more than a decade ago) they promised they would do that.