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Me too. I want protection against my own stupidity, as well as sheer ignorance of the charges. This put me off AWS for years, and I was deeply shocked there was

Me too. I want protection against my own stupidity, as well as sheer ignorance of the charges. This put me off AWS for years, and I was deeply shocked there was no one-click 'suspend at x$'. For a company that supposedly puts the customer first, this is appalling.

Pyxl101 10y ago
It's difficult to come up with a good model for how a billing ceiling would work in software as a service. A good start would be to fully specify what behavior you desire when an account hits its billing limit. Are you expecting everything to keep working like normal while the cloud provider pays the bill for those resources, or are you expecting the provider to fully shut everything down in a way that prevents the accrual of further costs, or something in between? There are a number of resource types that, simply by existing, will accrue costs. A lot of them, actually. On AWS that includes things like running EC2 instances, EBS volumes, RDS databases and backups, DynamoDB tables, data in S3 buckets, and more. The question is what should happen to these resources upon hitting a billing ceiling? Should EC2 instances be terminated (which deletes all data on them), DynamoDB tables deleted, S3 data erased, RDS databases deleted? If that was the behavior, it would be an extremely dangerous feature to enable, and could lead to catastrophically bad customer experiences. This is a nonstarter for any serious user. Conversely, if you expect those resources to continue to exist and continue operating, then that's basically expecting the cloud provider to pay your bill. The provider will then have to recoup those costs from other customers somehow, and so this option sets poor incentives and isn't fair to others. If you expect your account to remain open the following month, you'd have to settle the bill, and we're back to square one. AWS gives people tools to tackle this problem, such as billing alerts. These can notify you over SMS, email, or programmatically when you hit an "$X this month" billing threshold, and then you can decide what to do. Since these events can be processed programmatically, it's possible to build a system that will automatically take whatever action you'd like AWS to take, such as shutting things down or deleting resources. If you think all of this through, it's really hard to come up with an approach to billing limits that's fair and a good experience, so I think it's reasonable for cloud providers to give billing threshold alerts while leaving the choice of what to do in the hands of the customer.
- mrob 10y ago
  Raise the price by the actual cost of keeping the resources suspended for a week multiplied by the estimated probability of it happening. If that week passes with no additional payment then delete everything. The additional cost doesn't have to be applied to unlimited liability accounts. What's so difficult about that? There's not much worse customer experience than massive unexpected debt. Outages and data loss are minor problems compared to potential starvation and homelessness.
  - somecallitblues 10y ago
    Oh give me a break man. Starvation and homelessness. Deleting customers data is something you don't do. If they can't pay you can write off the bill. But people have committed suicides because of data loss. The parent post nailed it.
    - mrob 10y ago
      People have committed suicide over debts too. I'm not suggesting Amazon gets rid of unlimited liability accounts, only that they give customers the choice.
    - oh_sigh 10y ago
      If you're going to commit suicide if you lose your data, perhaps you shouldn't rely on the graciousness of a third party to save your data for free.
      - michaelmrose 10y ago
        I think financial ruin was the reason not data loss.
    - joe563323 10y ago
      > But people have committed suicides because of data loss. Citation Required
- unclebucknasty 10y ago
frandroid 10y ago
Sounds like a good business idea. Pay $10-50 a month for us to automatically disable your services which go over your stated budget. Free tier at 1 service.
- zwischenzug 10y ago
  Until you get successful and Amazon copy your implementation.
  - ahmedfromtunis 10y ago
    Which is the point, right?
  - zenlikethat 10y ago
    It'd definitely be a gamble, but imagine pitching this idea at Amazon HQ. "We're going to roll out a fantastic new project to allow our customers to spend fewer dollars on our platform!" Not saying Jevon's Paradox wouldn't kick in, but the friction of convincing businesses to work on tools to allow their customers to spend _less_ money is high.
    - numlocked 10y ago
      That's really not true at Amazon. It's deep in their core values to cut customer expenses whenever possible, regardless of competitive pressures. I can't explain why they don't offer this feature, but I doubt it's because anyone is scared of a feature that could potentially help customers.
      - vidarh 10y ago
        If that was true for AWS, their prices would be far lower pretty much across the board. One of the most amazing feats Amazon has pulled off is to convince people that AWS is cheap. They're cheap in the way that Apple are: Only if you need a feature-set (or name recognition..) that excludes the vast majority of the competitors from consideration. If/when you truly need that, then they're the right choice. There are plenty of valid reason to pick AWS. But they're very rarely the cheap choice.
zwischenzug 10y ago
If you think that solving this problem in a consumer-friendly way is beyond the wit of Amazon then I think you are wrong.
- runamok 10y ago
  Completely. I will say amazon is usually very good about refunding money if you made a mistake or got hacked so in that sense their customer service is pretty good. One time we had literally 1 million cloudwatch metrics get created because we were monitoring mongodb databases and a CPAN test was creating test DBs and not deleting them and we were not ignoring dbs created with names like test_* when creating the metrics. Another time an outside developer committed a root credential on a public repo in github to a (basically) unused amazon account. Both times they refunded the costs. Not sure if that was because we were paying tens of thousands a month though to get this service though!
  - joe563323 10y ago
    That is charity. Why not just put the <SHUTDOWN LIMIT EXCEEDED> check mark which will solve the issue entirely.
    - ec109685 10y ago
      What thing would they shut down first?

Pyxl101 10y ago

It's difficult to come up with a good model for how a billing ceiling would work in software as a service. A good start would be to fully specify what behavior you desire when an account hits its billing limit. Are you expecting everything to keep working like normal while the cloud provider pays the bill for those resources, or are you expecting the provider to fully shut everything down in a way that prevents the accrual of further costs, or something in between? There are a number of resource types that, simply by existing, will accrue costs. A lot of them, actually. On AWS that includes things like running EC2 instances, EBS volumes, RDS databases and backups, DynamoDB tables, data in S3 buckets, and more. The question is what should happen to these resources upon hitting a billing ceiling? Should EC2 instances be terminated (which deletes all data on them), DynamoDB tables deleted, S3 data erased, RDS databases deleted? If that was the behavior, it would be an extremely dangerous feature to enable, and could lead to catastrophically bad customer experiences. This is a nonstarter for any serious user. Conversely, if you expect those resources to continue to exist and continue operating, then that's basically expecting the cloud provider to pay your bill. The provider will then have to recoup those costs from other customers somehow, and so this option sets poor incentives and isn't fair to others. If you expect your account to remain open the following month, you'd have to settle the bill, and we're back to square one. AWS gives people tools to tackle this problem, such as billing alerts. These can notify you over SMS, email, or programmatically when you hit an "$X this month" billing threshold, and then you can decide what to do. Since these events can be processed programmatically, it's possible to build a system that will automatically take whatever action you'd like AWS to take, such as shutting things down or deleting resources. If you think all of this through, it's really hard to come up with an approach to billing limits that's fair and a good experience, so I think it's reasonable for cloud providers to give billing threshold alerts while leaving the choice of what to do in the hands of the customer.

mrob 10y ago
Raise the price by the actual cost of keeping the resources suspended for a week multiplied by the estimated probability of it happening. If that week passes with no additional payment then delete everything. The additional cost doesn't have to be applied to unlimited liability accounts. What's so difficult about that? There's not much worse customer experience than massive unexpected debt. Outages and data loss are minor problems compared to potential starvation and homelessness.
- somecallitblues 10y ago
  Oh give me a break man. Starvation and homelessness. Deleting customers data is something you don't do. If they can't pay you can write off the bill. But people have committed suicides because of data loss. The parent post nailed it.
  - mrob 10y ago
    People have committed suicide over debts too. I'm not suggesting Amazon gets rid of unlimited liability accounts, only that they give customers the choice.
  - oh_sigh 10y ago
    If you're going to commit suicide if you lose your data, perhaps you shouldn't rely on the graciousness of a third party to save your data for free.
    - michaelmrose 10y ago
      I think financial ruin was the reason not data loss.
  - joe563323 10y ago
    > But people have committed suicides because of data loss. Citation Required
unclebucknasty 10y ago

frandroid 10y ago

Sounds like a good business idea. Pay $10-50 a month for us to automatically disable your services which go over your stated budget. Free tier at 1 service.

zwischenzug 10y ago
Until you get successful and Amazon copy your implementation.
- ahmedfromtunis 10y ago
  Which is the point, right?
- zenlikethat 10y ago
  It'd definitely be a gamble, but imagine pitching this idea at Amazon HQ. "We're going to roll out a fantastic new project to allow our customers to spend fewer dollars on our platform!" Not saying Jevon's Paradox wouldn't kick in, but the friction of convincing businesses to work on tools to allow their customers to spend _less_ money is high.
  - numlocked 10y ago
    That's really not true at Amazon. It's deep in their core values to cut customer expenses whenever possible, regardless of competitive pressures. I can't explain why they don't offer this feature, but I doubt it's because anyone is scared of a feature that could potentially help customers.
    - vidarh 10y ago
      If that was true for AWS, their prices would be far lower pretty much across the board. One of the most amazing feats Amazon has pulled off is to convince people that AWS is cheap. They're cheap in the way that Apple are: Only if you need a feature-set (or name recognition..) that excludes the vast majority of the competitors from consideration. If/when you truly need that, then they're the right choice. There are plenty of valid reason to pick AWS. But they're very rarely the cheap choice.

zwischenzug 10y ago

If you think that solving this problem in a consumer-friendly way is beyond the wit of Amazon then I think you are wrong.

runamok 10y ago
Completely. I will say amazon is usually very good about refunding money if you made a mistake or got hacked so in that sense their customer service is pretty good. One time we had literally 1 million cloudwatch metrics get created because we were monitoring mongodb databases and a CPAN test was creating test DBs and not deleting them and we were not ignoring dbs created with names like test_* when creating the metrics. Another time an outside developer committed a root credential on a public repo in github to a (basically) unused amazon account. Both times they refunded the costs. Not sure if that was because we were paying tens of thousands a month though to get this service though!
- joe563323 10y ago
  That is charity. Why not just put the <SHUTDOWN LIMIT EXCEEDED> check mark which will solve the issue entirely.
  - ec109685 10y ago
    What thing would they shut down first?