Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AWS bill capping feature request thread still unanswered after 10 years

forums.aws.amazon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 170 posts

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

#31

Post by viraptor »

andrewguenther wrote: post #23
neolog wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having to make some design decisions doesn't mean it's impossible to design.

Budget alerts were the design decision made. You can set up your own infra to listen to budget alerts and cap your own costs. This is a feature that only makes sense to put in the customer's control because a general solution would work for no one. It's a great solution to the problem imo.

This is way too complicated for people who use AWS on a small scale. Maybe if they provided some template to implement that system in the first place?

Anyway, they should be able to protect people from an unexpected $1k charge. Once you deal with alerts triggering automatic infrastructure changes, $1k is likely a value you won't even notice.

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

#32

Post by croes »

andrewguenther wrote: post #13

It hasn't been implemented because it is nonsensical. So you hit your limit. Is all your storage deleted? You can't receive an alert because that costs something (even if it's a fraction of a cent) to send. Are your domains forfeit? Audit logs destroyed? There's no reasonable way to implement this. Billing alerts are the best you can do on this problem and I think it would be a good faith move for AWS to enable some…

You do understand that this is not a binary feature? Not just on or off. The point is not that there should be no costs, but that they should be minimised. This means that data that has to be written, such as logs, should continue to be written and may also incur costs, but everything else should be switched off to prevent you from suddenly being stuck with thousands of dollars in debt.

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

#33

Post by capybara_2020 »

andrewguenther wrote: post #13

It hasn't been implemented because it is nonsensical. So you hit your limit. Is all your storage deleted? You can't receive an alert because that costs something (even if it's a fraction of a cent) to send. Are your domains forfeit? Audit logs destroyed? There's no reasonable way to implement this. Billing alerts are the best you can do on this problem and I think it would be a good faith move for AWS to enable some…

As a small dev, I do not care if data is lost and they stop storing the data/turn off machines. I am more concerned about the cost. I have had two cases.

1. Misconfigured software that we accidentally pushed into production and by the time we noticed it like an hour later we were $100s out. Luckily it was not in the 1000s other that would have sunk the business. 2. An old account of ours got hacked and people spun up like 50-100 servers and it happened overnight and we had a bill of $50k-$70k. Luckily Amazon wrote that off for us. Otherwise I have no clue how we would have ever paid that.

These are usually extraordinary cases, so even if there is a data loss or your servers are shut down, it is a better option than going down the hole with 10s of 1000s in charges.

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

#34

Post by ghoomketu »

Yes this would be a super useful feature especially for dormant accounts. One of my old aws account was recently hacked and racked up bills in thousands of dollars.

The AWS support was super nice and took care of it for me but it gave me some sleepless nights until it was resolved.

If this was a feature I would have most definitely capped my account at 1k (my max bill being $50). They can always send alerts to increase your cap based on projections like it shows in cost explorer. Also since it's an opt-in feature I'm kinda taking responsibility that I'm okay if services are suspended due to hitting the caps.

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

#35

Post by preommr »

andrewguenther wrote: post #13

It hasn't been implemented because it is nonsensical. So you hit your limit. Is all your storage deleted? You can't receive an alert because that costs something (even if it's a fraction of a cent) to send. Are your domains forfeit? Audit logs destroyed? There's no reasonable way to implement this. Billing alerts are the best you can do on this problem and I think it would be a good faith move for AWS to enable some…

> You can't receive an alert because that costs something (even if it's a fraction of a cent) to send.

Yea, what a crazy world that would be if AWS just gave each account free stuff like free data transfer for the first gb, or free s3 storage for the first ~100mb

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

#36

Post by akira2501 »

lacker wrote: post #19

You 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…

> But once you realize that bill capping doesn't make sense for storage

I'd think you want something like a circuit breaker.. steady costs or slowly increasing costs aren't like to be a problem, but a sudden surge in costs is what I'm concerned with.

Perhaps if it operated like a time-averaged quota.. don't let me incur _new_ costs if I slide too far out of my apparent range. Give me a knob to control that range or temporarily disable it, and maybe a way to monitor those events so I can react to them appropriately for my particular application.

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

#37

Post by btilly »

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.

Not nearly as user hostile as the possibility of an unexpected DOS on your bank account while you're asleep.

Which has actually happened to people.

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

#38

Post by sathyabhat »

heipei wrote: post #20
andrewguenther wrote: post #13

It hasn't been implemented because it is nonsensical. So you hit your limit. Is all your storage deleted? You can't receive an alert because that costs something (even if it's a fraction of a cent) to send. Are your domains forfeit? Audit logs destroyed? There's no reasonable way to implement this. Billing alerts are the best you can do on this problem and I think it would be a good faith move for AWS to enable some…

At the very least allow users to roughly define what happens when the threshold is reached: S3 will still store data but maybe not serve anything, Lambdas will still be defined but not run, EC2 instances will keep running, etc. It's not supposed to be a hard cap as in "don't spend a penny more than my $5" but more as in "do everything possible and reasonable so the customer doesn't wake up to a sudden $20k overnight…

This sort of possible

> AWS Budgets now allows you to configure actions — responses to cost and usage in your account or set of accounts— that will be applied automatically or via a workflow approval process once a budget target has been exceeded. There are three action types: Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies, Service Control policies (SCPs), or target running instances (EC2 or RDS). Actions can be configured for actual (after they’ve occurred) or for forecasted (before they occur) budgeted amounts.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws-cost-management/get-started...

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

#39

Post by raverbashing »

andrewguenther wrote: post #13

It hasn't been implemented because it is nonsensical. So you hit your limit. Is all your storage deleted? You can't receive an alert because that costs something (even if it's a fraction of a cent) to send. Are your domains forfeit? Audit logs destroyed? There's no reasonable way to implement this. Billing alerts are the best you can do on this problem and I think it would be a good faith move for AWS to enable some…

> AWS has to think of everyone.

Sure. That's why you make it optional. And configurable in a way

But at a very basic idea, blocking new services from being started and throttling of existing ones would go a long way in helping. A very long way.

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

#40

Post by IanCal »

andrewguenther wrote: post #13

It hasn't been implemented because it is nonsensical. So you hit your limit. Is all your storage deleted? You can't receive an alert because that costs something (even if it's a fraction of a cent) to send. Are your domains forfeit? Audit logs destroyed? There's no reasonable way to implement this. Billing alerts are the best you can do on this problem and I think it would be a good faith move for AWS to enable some…

A limit to the cost to me. I don't care what the cost to Amazon is.

> So you hit your limit. Is all your storage deleted?

Easy. Cut access, don't delete the files, set a time limit for resolving the problem before they are deleted.

> EDIT: Lots of people proposing solutions that work for them. AWS has to think of everyone.

No they don't. A feature that solves the main problem for lots of users can be added and for the users that need a complex solution, well, they can justnot use the simple one.

Post reply on HN