Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

A poorly implemented design decision then (which they turned off on AWS back in 2012 due to exactly this happening to many people). https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=101218

There was no way at the time for me to a) see that I had a second account associated with my email address or b) reset the password for the second account without going through support c) merging the two accounts into one even with supports help.

yes.

> Should EC2 instances be terminated (which deletes all data on them)

You know exactly how much a paused EC2 instance charges you. The ceiling implementation could say, if the total amount charged so far this month, plus the cost of pausing the instance for the rest of the month, exceeds the ceiling, pause it now. So there's no data loss; the worst case is the customer's service is offline for the remainder of the month (or until they approve adding more money). At some point less than this number, start sending angry alerts. But you still have a hard cap that doesn't lose data.

It's not what a serious production user wants, but it's exactly what someone experimenting with AWS wants, either a running service that's looking at a cloud migration, or a new project/startup that hasn't launched yet.

I keep wondering how accurate is that. On one hand implementing that precisely surely must be difficult - if it wasn't, everyone would have it. On the other hand, Azure clearly have issues calculating the bills in real time. Heck, once I kicked off a bunch of large VMs for a day. Once shut down I checked out the billing page - the costs estimates kept increasing every hour!

My hypothesis is that they don't really have it nailed down but given big margins they have they can afford to let you use more resources than you pay for in the end.

And the "correct answer" sometimes leads you to realising "Hang on, I just asked the wrong question to the wrong people".

So lets for a moment assume you talked to a large cohort of customers, and found a bunch of "types" including those three you list and many many more (inevitably, at AWS's scale).

You then need to make some business decisions about which of those "types" are most important to you, and which are way less profitable to spend time addressing.

So of course you solve the big pain points for your customers spending tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per month before you prioritise the customers worried abou going over a tens or hundreds of dollars a month budget.

What would that solution look like? It'd have ways for customers with hundreds or thousands of services (virtual servers, databases, storage, etc) to make all their own decisions about alarms, alerts, cost ceilings - and tools to let them decide how to respond to costs, how to manage their data availability, how to manage capacity, when to shut down services or limit scaling, what can and cannot be deleted from storage. It would also 100% need to allow for practically unbounded capacity/costs for customers who need that (Think AliExpress on their "Single's Day" event where they processed $1 billion in sales in 5 minutes.) All this would need - for the $100k+/month customers - to be machine drivable and automateable, with extensive monitoring and reliable alerting mechanisms - and the ability to build as much reliability and availability into the alerting/reporting/monitoring system and the automated provisioning and deprovisioning systems as each customer needs.

And at least to a first approximation - we've just invented 70% of the AWS ecosystem.

You might think Amazon don't cater to people who want hard $5 or $70 per month upper limits on their spending. You're _mostly_ right. There are many other people playing in that space, and it's _clearly_ not a high priority for Amazon to complete for the pennies a month available in the race-to-the-bottom webhosting that people like GoDaddy sell for $12/year.

The thing to think about is - "who does Amazon consider to be 'their customers'?". I think you'll find for the accounts spending 7 figures a year with AWS - billing _is_ "solved". The rest of us are on the loss-leader path (quite literally for the "free tier" accounts) - because Amazon only need to turn a few tenths or hundredths of a percent of "little accounts" into "their customers" for it all to work out as spectacularly profitably as it is doing right now.