Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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
#42You 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…
> You basically never want storage to be automatically deleted even if your program suddenly uses a surprising amount
In most use cases you're right. But never? Not true, not all storage is used the same way. And the thing is, why should Amazon decide which use case is valid or not? I might care more about being able to afford the service than to keep the data around, depending on what kind of service I offer my user. As a platform provider, they should be agnostic, but their greed for money is shining through their willingness to be a true platform provider.
Re: AWS bill capping feature request thread still unanswered after 10 years
#43My 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…
GCP doesn't support a cap, only alerts. You can use those alerts to implement your own cap mechanism, same as how it works on AWS except AWS billing is only on a one hour delay I believe so I'd say AWS wins here.
Indeed, here is GCP's own guide which confirms what you say and provides a hacky way to implement a cap mechanism.
https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/notify#cap_disa...
Re: AWS bill capping feature request thread still unanswered after 10 years
#44It 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…
Your comment makes it seem like it’s impossible for Amazon to determine you exceeded the threshold until after you exceeded it. Why couldn’t it work like rate limiting does but for resource consumption not just requests per X time?
Re: AWS bill capping feature request thread still unanswered after 10 years
#45Do Google/Azure have this?
Not sure about Google, but Azure has it with some subscription types but not all.
I have an Azure subscription that gets some free monthly credits. When I go over the limit on that subscription, everything freezes until I sort it out.
Re: AWS bill capping feature request thread still unanswered after 10 years
#46How 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.
My experience is just one data point but:
My expertise is not at all anything related to web development so when I first tried experimenting with AWS for a side project I was terrified. It was an experiment for me and i didn't care if it deleted the data since the data it was storing was test data I was uploading. However, my budget for my entire side project was $500 and it seemed totally feasible (at least to a first time user of such a service) that some wrong lines in the code could balloon the requests or storage I made. At the time, I didn't even have $5000 of liquid assets and it would have been a nightmare.
Re: AWS bill capping feature request thread still unanswered after 10 years
#47It 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.
You can implement this on top of budget actions today: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws-cost-management/get-started...
Re: AWS bill capping feature request thread still unanswered after 10 years
#48From the service side...What happens when the user quota resets? You see a flood of traffic to the service. That might trigger anomaly alerts or you run out of capacity.
Another issue is how often does the quota reset? Daily? Hourly? Monthly? That’ll determine how big those spikes are when the quota lifts.
Re: AWS bill capping feature request thread still unanswered after 10 years
#49How 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.
That would be substantively less user hostile to me than a massive bill on a personal project, which is easy to see occurring for any number of reasons.
Re: AWS bill capping feature request thread still unanswered after 10 years
#50Do Google/Azure have this?
Most Azure services don’t, but Azure Monitor does. I guess it’s easy to deploy something that emits tons of logs or metrics inadvertently, so having a quota might be nice.
I think it’s tricky to implement, though.