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AWS bill capping feature request thread still unanswered after 10 years

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Re: AWS bill capping feature request thread still unanswered after 10 years

#111

Post by soco »

runnerup wrote: post #11

My 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…

But does it need to be solved perfectly? Change my mind, but I don't believe anybody, garage nerd or small startup, would be affected if they overshot their planned costs by 10%. I really need a solution when my bill gets by (my) mistake 100x bigger. And I'm convinced AWS could so easily solve this - if they cared to.

Re: AWS bill capping feature request thread still unanswered after 10 years

#112

Post by toomanybeersies »

thitcanh wrote: post #74
forty wrote: post #70

I'm told some really fancy restaurants would not show the prices on the rational that "if you need to know the price, then it's too expensive for you" Well, I think the same point can be made here: if you need a price cap, then AWS is too expensive for you ;)

I use a few free APIs with usage limits. Maybe I pay 10 cents a year. I’m always afraid to one time open an invoice to find out it’s way more than that for whatever reason. The problem is that AWS markets itself as “pay what you use” and generally that’s extremely little for me, but if I screw up with Glacier I suppose I could get a $100 bill because I restored some backups the wrong way .

> but if I screw up with Glacier I suppose I could get a $100 bill because I restored some backups the wrong way.

You wouldn't be the first person to do that: https://medium.com/@karppinen/how-i-ended-up-paying-150-for-...

Re: AWS bill capping feature request thread still unanswered after 10 years

#114

Post by exactlysolved »

karmasimida wrote: post #21

How is this going to be implemented? When it reach the cap, all your service stop working? This is incredibly user hostile. If you want some warning when utilization is high, it can be relatively easy to setup with AWS's existing feature, but you need to do some configuration/tweaking on your own.

> When it reach the cap, all your service stop working? This is incredibly user hostile.

So set your cap to a very high number, much higher than any amount you expect to be billed. Surely for everyone there is some number at which they would rather their services go down, than have to pay it?

Re: AWS bill capping feature request thread still unanswered after 10 years

#115

Post by rk06 »

runnerup wrote: post #11

My 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…

but Azure has a cap? if MSFT can do it, what is preventing GCP or Amazon to do the same.

and it takes GCP a day to report billing to consumer. they can monitor the data earlier than that, and stop the services early

Re: AWS bill capping feature request thread still unanswered after 10 years

#116

Post by p1necone »

nucleardog wrote: post #107
p1necone wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

You're over complicating things, I'm not assuming the existence of any magical function (other than the one Amazon already uses to calculate your bill). All I want is to be able to say "I do not, under any circumstances want to spend more than $X per month on this service." Amazon just needs to keep track of usage, and start rate limiting/returning 402s/blocking writes when the monthly limit is hit.

If I estimate I'm going to need to spend $400 a month on my bill, then I might set a limit of $800, send me an email warning when I'm getting close, I'll go in and work out why I'm consuming much more than I expected. If I don't hit the "let me exceed my billing limit this month" button then stop the service. (but don't delete any data, I'm not sure why so many commenters seem to think this is a necessary step).

Amazon is capable of calculating how much to charge you every month, so they're capable of doing this too. No fancy estimation required.

==================================

So under your example - I upload my 10gb file, but some bug in my processing code means it doesn't get deleted and sits there for a while. Maybe I don't notice and it sits there for a few days instead of a few seconds, but Amazon sends me an automatic email because my usage this month so far is X% higher than the average of my last Y months.

Ideal scenario: I go in, investigate, delete the file and temporarily increase my billing cap just for this month.

Not great, but okay scenario: I don't notice the email, a few days later and I'm at ~2x my previous months bill (or whatever limit I've set up), amazon automatically starts returning 402s when I try to access my storage service. I am happy because this is still much better than getting a bill for 10x my previous amount at the end of the month instead.

Re: AWS bill capping feature request thread still unanswered after 10 years

#117

Post by matkoniecz »

vineyardmike wrote: post #92
btilly wrote: post #25

Earlier 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…

> In fact Amazon is in a much better position than customers to absorb those costs And if you call amazon support and talk to them, especially as an individual, you might get your bill cancelled.

I am not going to risk runaway costs in hope that Amazon "might" cancel it.

Though, apparently population both caring about it and avoiding Amazon as result would pay less than cost of implementing it and not refunded income from catastrophic runaways.

Re: AWS bill capping feature request thread still unanswered after 10 years

#118

Post by matkoniecz »

toomanybeersies wrote: post #110
oliwarner wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"I may lose my home and all savings" is scary enough that just possibility of that happening legally is enough for me.

Re: AWS bill capping feature request thread still unanswered after 10 years

#119

Post by matkoniecz »

andrewguenther wrote: post #64
johnwheeler wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the hell good is a budget alert when you’ve launched 2000 high memory instances because your programmer screwed up?

Because those alerts are hookable and could shut down the instance.

With delay measured in hours.

Re: AWS bill capping feature request thread still unanswered after 10 years

#120

Post by aranelsurion »

I believe at the very least they could offer a more flexible way of managing Service Quotas.

Currently it's too much of a hassle to increase/decrease account-wide limits: it takes too much time, depends on AWS Support, UX is nowhere as nice as, say instance reservations etc.

As a result of this people tend to increase the limits once in a while just to make sure it doesn't become an issue at a very unfortunate time, and that's it. It never gets decreased/managed again. It's obviously not seen as a use-case by AWS, since they only have a "Request quota increase" button in the UI, and no "decrease" button. [1]

SQ on its own wouldn't cover all kinds of costs (for on-demand items like Lambda executions they offer limits on rates, not total count), but it'd be better than nothing, it'd prevent scenarios where you'd wake up to 100 GPU instances mining bitcoin, and it's within the quotas since Bob asked for an increase two years ago to try something.

[1] Just having a button there would still be an awful UX, yet I believe its complete omission is noteworthy.

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