This thread is full of people complaining that they just want the ability to set a hard billing cap. And yet, providers continue to insist that no serious customer wants this and/or it's impossible to implement.
What would it take for providers to listen to real customers here?
I have $25k in cloud spend that we absolutely cannot go one single cent over due to the politics of internal budgeting. That's my reality. If you want my $25k, I need to ensure that I don't spend more than this amount.
As is, my solution is to use old-school pre-rented, long-term contracted commitment VM hosting providers. This is really the only way to guarantee that you are paying an exact amount and no more.
But, I really would like to use a more scalable system that didn't require pre-provisioning. And, I wish people would believe the customer when they say something and not continue to gaslight us.
Providers say it's impossible, but I don't see how it would be so hard. Here's my sketch of how it could work:
The main component is a system that monitors billing events and watches for the slope of the bill to ensure that there is enough runway to stay under the cap. Optionally, they could implement rate limits on resource creation to ensure that a sudden surge doesn't outrun the monitoring.
You also need notifications for when the projected spend exceeds the cap. Optionally, you could implement a soft cap, where no new resources can be created.
And finally, you need the hard cap where things start to get deleted. If they're feeling generous, the provider could implement a period where VM's/lambda's/etc are shut off, blob storage is not accessible, and so on so that the account holder has some time to fund the account and/or fix whatever is causing the overage.
That set of features are all totally within the competency of a cloud provider. Knowing how much things cost, billing for them, and turning them on and off is their main business. And I can't believe that they expect us to believe that it's impossible to do that tracking.
This is how I do system migrations. There are escalating warnings until one day the service is shutoff for an hour and turned back on. That wakes up any laggards that missed the dozen or so communications over a three-to-six month period. Finally, after a few more days, the service is shutdown for good and then data is deleted a week after that. Though I almost always keep a copy in cold storage. But that isn't necessary as a provider with a limited relationship to the client.