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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

#91

Post by _flux »

yorwba wrote: post #86
_flux wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I guess the question is how precise monitoring and reactionary system Amazon wants build for this, for an arguably marginal use case anyway; they do already provide Amazon Budgets for automatic actions when exceeding budgets, but it's quite not as real-time. And then making the niche cases favor the customer is an invitation to abuse.

But least all Amazon accounts are tied to a credit card, so abusing in a scale similar to e.g. the GitHub case is not that easy.

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

#92

Post by vineyardmike »

btilly wrote: post #25
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…

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.

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

#93

Post by onion2k »

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…

My understanding is that this is a difficult problem to solve "perfectly" due to lag between incurring a cost and recording the cost.

It's impossible to solve perfectly with tech.

Amazon saying "If you put a number in this form we won't charge you more than that, but your account will be limited by and if you go over those limits then " is a perfect solution.

The only reason why there would need to be a perfect tech solution is if AWS are concerned about giving people a small amount of service that they're not able to charge for. AWS clearly believe protecting themselves from overages is more important than giving customers peace of mind that they're not going to be hit with a huge bill. That's a reasonable position for a business to take, and they're completely free to do it, but you can't also argue that customers are wrong to avoid deploying to AWS because they're scared of a surprise bill.

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

#94

Post by onion2k »

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.

you might get your bill cancelled

The "might" in your post is doing a lot of work.

FWIW I know of a startup whose video sharing app was used to reshare a pay per view football match and they incurred a $30k bandwidth bill that AWS did not cancel. That killed the startup. It was largely their own fault for not securing the platform well enough, or moderating popular streams, but being able to cap their AWS bill would have kept them in business..

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

#95

Post by onion2k »

_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..

It's trivial to add a clause that says "If you add a cap to the cost of your account you can only have 3 concurrent instances."

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

#96

Post by mjevans »

Back of the napkin algorithm:

Borrow what DHCP does for leases, but with payment quotas.

First layer is a burst quota, up to that maximum in any spike. This only regenerates when the (monthly?) average quota has enough slack at current that an additional burst can be harvested without the remaining average being under the initial set value. (The math would probably be different, remaining period quota less burst average over time greater than period quota average, but that's the sales description of the concept.)

The second layer is the monthly (or some other period) average for the maximum expenditure allowed.

A billing endpoint would maintain a fractional bucket of spending (divided up as makes sense) but in the case of a single quota consumer would receive an estimate for the period (ideally the burst) and allow up to half of that to be used. At that point it will 'renew' the quota (lease), and flush billing, including sending alerts. If there isn't any further quota the remaining released balance would be consumed and then requests fail.

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

#97

Post by _0o6v »

GrantZvolsky wrote: post #80
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.

I had been in the same position for about ten years until I set up a limited liability company. It does take some effort to set up and costs about $20/month[1], but to me the peace of mind is well worth it. [1]: https://www.ukpostbox.com/address/business-address-service

A limited liability company may mean you're personally not liable, but your business can still be made bankrupt which isn't much better.

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

#98

Post by viraptor »

andrewguenther wrote: post #41
viraptor wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

This is still a bit low level. You need to think through the policies and they don't affect the traffic. I don't think that's enough for beginners.

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

#99

Post by forty »

NoPicklez wrote: post #84
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.

Sorry about that, I thought the ;) would have made it clear that this is a joke.
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