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Why not setup budgets? https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2/budgets-managing-costs.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/l

• MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  Because they want a hard guaranteed ceiling on charges, not after-the-fact alerting for spikes in chargeable activity. AWS does not support a 'pre-pay' model, and to my knowledge there's no water-tight way of capping your costs. Yes, you can build an watchdog to nuke all your instances if you go over-budget, but there's still the risk of missing some unexpected source of costs, or misconfiguring your watchdog, or perhaps not getting there in time, etc. AWS could support pre-pay, but they don't. I think it's a reasonable criticism. There are plenty of horror stories about surprise AWS bills. [0][1] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10921365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10921365 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22412869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22412869
  • stingraycharles 6y ago
    Reminds me of that time we accidentally left a really large Redshift cluster online, for two weeks, before somebody noticed. It was around $12.5k if my memory serves me right. Never managed to get the money back. They always seem to focus on building tools around reporting (ie “budgets” being just a report, rather than an actual enforceable budget). But I still can’t escape the fear of accidentally triggering something that costs a lot. It still happens sometimes, a sudden $1k EFS bill being the latest.