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You don’t let people start up the service if it will exceed a cost quota. For ec2 that should be easy since the cost ticks at a constant rate and can be extrapo

You don’t let people start up the service if it will exceed a cost quota. For ec2 that should be easy since the cost ticks at a constant rate and can be extrapolated in advance, but yeah other usage based services like s3 and network traffic that won’t work.

cthalupa 7y ago
>but yeah other usage based services like s3 and network traffic that won’t work. I think this is the major problem. It's conceptually easy to say 'Yeah no more spinning up ec2 instances' or whatever, but the only way to deal with hitting that cap for things like network traffic or storage services is just turning off network access or deleting the files. I can't imagine many businesses are going to go for "hey if you set a cap and you exceed it we fix it by deleting your stuff and taking down network availability." - that's going to be a total nonstarter in so many situations! But that's what would be required to actually set a spending cap on an account. That sort of decision really needs to be made by a human as it's happening - is the spike in usage legitimate? Is it your customers driving the demand? Is it unwanted traffic? Is it an autoscaling group gone wrong? etc. etc. etc. My suggestion is setting up CW billing alarms at several thresholds, to try and stay ahead of this before it reaches that point, with paging on the highest threshold where it's about at the point where you'd consider turning things off. Then you should hopefully be able to take care of unexpected expenses before they're problematic, but also ready to engage someone to make the tough decisions instead of just automatically taking yourself down.
- dvfjsdhgfv 7y ago
  > But that's what would be required to actually set a spending cap on an account. Nevertheless, that's exactly what people have been asking for several years. See this thread for example (and many others): https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=58127&start=50&tstart=0 https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=58127&sta...
  - marcinzm 7y ago
    Not really, that thread is asking for a limit on S3 traffic serving (ie: bandwidth used). That doesn't cap the account spend nor does it delete data (and you will continue to be charged for data storage, requests, etc.). The thread has a limited and reasonable request which is totally separate from account spend limits.
marcinzm 7y ago
> For ec2 that should be easy since the cost ticks at a constant rate and can be extrapolated in advance, Only if you don't use auto-scaling of any kind and you can already set up budgets which will alert you if your usage is expected to go above some thresholds.

cthalupa 7y ago

>but yeah other usage based services like s3 and network traffic that won’t work. I think this is the major problem. It's conceptually easy to say 'Yeah no more spinning up ec2 instances' or whatever, but the only way to deal with hitting that cap for things like network traffic or storage services is just turning off network access or deleting the files. I can't imagine many businesses are going to go for "hey if you set a cap and you exceed it we fix it by deleting your stuff and taking down network availability." - that's going to be a total nonstarter in so many situations! But that's what would be required to actually set a spending cap on an account. That sort of decision really needs to be made by a human as it's happening - is the spike in usage legitimate? Is it your customers driving the demand? Is it unwanted traffic? Is it an autoscaling group gone wrong? etc. etc. etc. My suggestion is setting up CW billing alarms at several thresholds, to try and stay ahead of this before it reaches that point, with paging on the highest threshold where it's about at the point where you'd consider turning things off. Then you should hopefully be able to take care of unexpected expenses before they're problematic, but also ready to engage someone to make the tough decisions instead of just automatically taking yourself down.

dvfjsdhgfv 7y ago
> But that's what would be required to actually set a spending cap on an account. Nevertheless, that's exactly what people have been asking for several years. See this thread for example (and many others): https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=58127&start=50&tstart=0 https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=58127&sta...
- marcinzm 7y ago
  Not really, that thread is asking for a limit on S3 traffic serving (ie: bandwidth used). That doesn't cap the account spend nor does it delete data (and you will continue to be charged for data storage, requests, etc.). The thread has a limited and reasonable request which is totally separate from account spend limits.

marcinzm 7y ago

> For ec2 that should be easy since the cost ticks at a constant rate and can be extrapolated in advance, Only if you don't use auto-scaling of any kind and you can already set up budgets which will alert you if your usage is expected to go above some thresholds.