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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

#81

Post by fabian2k »

I understand that there's an endless number of edge cases that are hard or impossible to solve here. But the unlimited potential charges eliminate AWS for certain scenarios.

I would not use AWS for private stuff because of this, it is simply not worth it to risk huge bills to me personally. Of course what I might spend on AWS is peanuts, but it could translate into using AWS with my employer because I'm familiar with certain parts of it.

And even professionally this is kind of a risk, especially if you're working for a small company. And even more if you're not that experienced with AWS, there's a lot of parts to it and it can be really hard to figure out what is costing you money exactly, if you're not an AWS expert. I once created a relatively small, but noticeable charge on AWS due to a recurring script transferring a lot more data than intended. With my limited knowledge it was pretty much impossible to figure out the exact source from AWS tools. I more or less stumbled upon the issue randomly while looking into this, which is kinda scary to me.

All this does make AWS less attractive compared to classic hosting/renting a server, if that fits your use case and the lesser flexibility isn't an issue.

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

#82

Post by oliwarner »

cr1pablo wrote: post #68

As 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.

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

#83

Post by Roark66 »

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…

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 services).

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

#84

Post by NoPicklez »

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 ;)

Well that's just rubbish.

The whole idea of services like AWS is that it is scalable as a solution for startups, small businesses and large global corporations. Not just large corporations that would be considered customers of a "fancy" web services provider.

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

#85

Post by dataflow »

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…

> It hasn't been implemented because it is nonsensical.

If that's the case then why hasn't it been responded to? Is responding also nonsensical?

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

#86

Post by yorwba »

_flux wrote: post #79
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…

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..

That's where "if the costs become exorbitant, Amazon is in a better position to improve their own systems to reduce the amount of overages that people run into in practice" comes in.

If starting 1000 instances exceeds your configured budget, they could simply not start them, and shut down whatever number of instances you managed to start as soon as their cost exceeds the budget.

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

#87

Post by mjevans »

lloeki wrote: post #61
Hamuko wrote: post #6

It's never too late. 21 years after being reported, Firefox finally has native macOS context menus in the nightly version. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34572

Ah, maybe in 10 years they'll use the native file pickers.

That would be wonderful on Linux... I would really really love to use my desktop environment's picker which integrates with the rest of the experience and isn't the preschooler file picker UI that firefox defaults to.

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

#88

Post by mkl »

e_commerce wrote: post #2

They're on the decline and are now in the "extract every last cent" phase of the organization.

So you think they were already declining ten years ago, and still are? Amazon's market cap has gone up by a factor of 20 in that time.

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

#89

Post by sneak »

_flux wrote: post #79
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…

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..

> 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..

All AWS accounts start off without the ability to do this (via the quota system) and being able to start 1000 ec2 instances of any type is a setting that needs to be unlocked via a support request (which can never be done by that support person, but always needs to be escalated to the "service team" and takes about 1 business day).

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