Build your own monitoring services. lol.
AWS bill capping feature request thread still unanswered after 10 years
101–110 of 170 posts
Re: AWS bill capping feature request thread still unanswered after 10 years
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is an argument for why these overages occur. It isn't an argument for why customers should eat that cost rather than Amazon. In fact Amazon is in a much better position than customers to absorb those costs. Sure, they'd have to increase rates slightly to cover it. But it would give customers peace of mind. And if the costs become exorbitant, Amazon is in a better position to improve their own systems to reduce t…
Should they simply automatically eat the costs then it would undoubtedly result in abuse. Just look at GitHub Actions. Oh I didn't think I was starting 1000 instances of miners in the EC2 GPU cloud, it certainly exceeded my configured budget, please give my money back..
Don't give your customers unlimited margin and leverage then. See also: Archegos.
Re: AWS bill capping feature request thread still unanswered after 10 years
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is an argument for why these overages occur. It isn't an argument for why customers should eat that cost rather than Amazon. In fact Amazon is in a much better position than customers to absorb those costs. Sure, they'd have to increase rates slightly to cover it. But it would give customers peace of mind. And if the costs become exorbitant, Amazon is in a better position to improve their own systems to reduce t…
Should they simply automatically eat the costs then it would undoubtedly result in abuse. Just look at GitHub Actions. Oh I didn't think I was starting 1000 instances of miners in the EC2 GPU cloud, it certainly exceeded my configured budget, please give my money back..
"You can only launch 1 concurrent EC2 instance per $100 on your max cap, if you want to launch 1000 instances of EC2 your max cap needs to be set to at least $100.000, or to $unlimited".
There are many solutions to this problem to prevent abuse. All of which are way better for consumers than the status quo of everybody having an $unlimited spending limit.
Re: AWS bill capping feature request thread still unanswered after 10 years
#104My understanding is that this is a difficult problem to solve "perfectly" due to lag between incurring a cost and recording the cost. I believe GCP currently has the best feature for this. You can set both billing alerts as well as caps. However, I also believe that it can take up to 24 hours between incurring a cost and it showing up on your billing report. So even on GCP (which is the most forward-thinking cloud se…
This argument ("it's not implemented because it's to difficult to do properly") was debated ad nauseam in the past. Well, look how others implemented it and you will see how to do it.
A simple example: S3. Currently, what happens when you exceed your credit card limit is that they send you an email they weren't able to charge you but they continue to provide the service for the next two months, and during that time everything works fine: you can access your buckets and you are charged for storage and transfer.
Now, what would happen with hard caps implemented? You didn't pay, so you're locked out of your account. Nobody can access your S3 objects, including yourself. If you care enough about them, you need to make a payment and settle your account. If you don't do it within one month, the whole content will be deleted.
Re: AWS bill capping feature request thread still unanswered after 10 years
#105As a junior developer I'm always afraid using any AWS service to make a mistake that cost me a lot of money. I'm not talking about millions, simply 2k would be really bad for me.
I had been in the same position for about ten years until I set up a limited liability company. It does take some effort to set up and costs about $20/month[1], but to me the peace of mind is well worth it. [1]: https://www.ukpostbox.com/address/business-address-service
The cost to own an LLC varies a lot on jurisdiction. Even in the USA, it can vary considerably from state to state.
Re: AWS bill capping feature request thread still unanswered after 10 years
#106If anyone from AWS is reading this - is there any way we can get multiple devices for 2FA?
Re: AWS bill capping feature request thread still unanswered after 10 years
#107You really need to implement limits service-by-service, and with as many services as AWS has, it would make sense if some of them hadn't implemented limits yet. Think about the details... if you are paying something for both storage and bandwidth, and get a sudden surge of bandwidth, do you really want items in storage to be deleted? You basically never want storage to be automatically deleted even if your program su…
I don't think you ever want storage to be deleted as part of an automatic bill cap system. Just refuse access, or allow reads but not writes until the customer reviews it. There's even an HTTP code for it: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/402 (non standard, but I know for a fact it's used by Azure). Actually deleting things should be done after a period of time specified in writing in the cont…
> and I can't really see any reasons it couldn't work.
You’re assuming the existence of a function which can extrapolate the daily/monthly/etc costs.
If I upload a 10GB file at $0.10/gbmo, how much will it cost me? We have no idea because we don’t know how long it will be up there.
We have a process that downloads and streams massive reports into S3, then a process is immediately kicked off to handle processing and importing. As soon as that completes, the files are deleted.
So we’re paying about 0.04 months of storage every month. The naive solution is estimating 1.00. You’re off by a factor of ~24.
We could... not handle that. Now we’re in a situation where we’re consistently spending $100/mo on storage, set a liberal $150 budget and immediately everything breaks. We actually needed to set a $2400 budget! Expecting a $100 bill and getting a $2400 bill some month when something goes wrong is as good as doing nothing.
You’re also going to need to account for the interaction of every single object in a bucket and the lifecycle rules set which is an absolutely ridiculous amount of overhead.
Now extend this to... literally every one of the seemingly bazillion AWS services.
The only cap that’s going to be easy and realistic to implement without a crystal ball is a hard cut-off once you’ve actually accrued the charges, and a “shut down all my servers, delete all my data, and just close my account” cap is useful to almost no one.
If you want useful caps they need to be aware of your workload. The best person to implement those is you. The tools are there.
Re: AWS bill capping feature request thread still unanswered after 10 years
#108This finally answers my bafflement over why my requests for a transfer cap feature have been ignored by all thin-second-layer providers of the Vercel etc. type...
Re: AWS bill capping feature request thread still unanswered after 10 years
#109My understanding is that this is a difficult problem to solve "perfectly" due to lag between incurring a cost and recording the cost. I believe GCP currently has the best feature for this. You can set both billing alerts as well as caps. However, I also believe that it can take up to 24 hours between incurring a cost and it showing up on your billing report. So even on GCP (which is the most forward-thinking cloud se…
There are no billing limits, but there are resource limits set by AWS upfront. I had to create many support cases to raise this or that limit. (for example we had a limit if 100 concurrent lambda workers, then 2.5k if I remember correctly). Some number of active ec2s, some total TB of storage etc. We were hitting those limits pretty frequently despite spending over £50k per month with them (mostly dev and test servic…
I'm pretty sure that AWS' service quotas exist more as a guardrail to prevent customers from accidentally spinning up 1000 instances instead of 10, which would not only leave you with an eye-watering bill, but affect resource availability for other customers.
They're usually quite happy to increate the quote if you contact support.
Re: AWS bill capping feature request thread still unanswered after 10 years
#110As a junior developer I'm always afraid using any AWS service to make a mistake that cost me a lot of money. I'm not talking about millions, simply 2k would be really bad for me.
Anyone who is personally liable for the the bill should be terrified of AWS. It's enough to lose your business to a usage spike, much worse to lose your home and car. I struggle to consider a scenario where setting up a limited liability organisation wouldn't make sense, even if only for interacting with Amazon.
Is there any record of Amazon going after people (and not companies) for unpaid bills?
More often than not, I hear stories about how AWS support zeroed out the bill instead.