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Hard spend limits are not an easy problem with cloud. There are too many things that incur costs. Everytime this comes up, I ask the same question: what do you

Hard spend limits are not an easy problem with cloud. There are too many things that incur costs. Everytime this comes up, I ask the same question: what do you expect to happen when the quota is hit? Shutdown your servers? Wipe your SSDs and storage buckets? Remove your DNS records? Should it be permanent? If not then they're just subsidizing the costs. If it's soft-limit then its just a warning, and if you just want a warning then billing alarms already exist in every cloud. Also for most customers, the data and service is far more important than the cost. Bills can be negotiated or forgiven afterwards. Lost data and customers can't.

fauigerzigerk 6y ago
I want all services to be rate limited. What I don't want is for some runaway process (whatever the cause) to bankrupt me before I can respond to any alerts (i.e within hours). In other words, I don't necessarily need to set a hard spending limit, but I want to set a hard spending growth limit (allowing for short bursts), either directly in monetary terms or indirectly through rate limits on individual services.
- ngcc_hk 6y ago
  I avoid those for the sane reason. I do not mind to pay for a few dollars for side projects. But not unlimited bill.
donmcronald 6y ago
> Shutdown your servers? Wipe your SSDs and storage buckets? Remove your DNS records? Should it be permanent? I'd be absolutely fine with that in a sub-account or resource group as long as I had to enable it. A while back I wanted to try out an Azure Resource Manager template as part of learning something. Since I was _learning_ it, I wasn't 100% positive what it was going to do, but I knew that it should cost about $1 to deploy it. With a hard limit on spending I would have set it to $10, run the thing and been ok with the account being wiped if I hit $10. Even $100 I could tolerate. Unlimited $$ was too risky for me, so I chickened out. The worst part is I can't even delete my CC because it's tied to an expired trial that I can't update billing for. > Also for most customers, the data and service is far more important than the cost. So don't enable the hard limit.
- manigandham 6y ago
  Since the vast majority of errors are user error, this is just another potential disaster waiting to happen.
imtringued 6y ago
>Shutdown your servers? Wipe your SSDs and storage buckets? Remove your DNS records? Should it be permanent? If not then they're just subsidizing the costs. If it's soft-limit then its just a warning, and if you just want a warning then billing alarms already exist in every cloud. You know. When I hit the storage limit of my SSD it doesn't wipe my data. It just ceases to store more data. When I rent a server for a fixed price and my service is under a DDOS attack then it will simply cease to work for the duration of the attack. If there is a variable service like lamba that charges per execution then lambda can simply cease to run my jobs. You can neatly separate time based and usage based charges and set a limit for them separately. It doesn't even need to be a monetary limit, it could be a resource based limit. Every service would be limited to 0GB storage, 0GB RAM, 0 nodes, 0 queries, 0 api calls by default and you set the limit to whatever you want. AWS or Google Cloud could then calculate the maximum possible bill for the limits you have chosen. People will can then set their limits so that a surprise bill won't be significantly above their usual bill. Your comment is lazy and not very creative. You're just throwing your hands up and pretending there is no other way even though cloud providers have created this situation for their own benefit.
- manigandham 6y ago
  The vast majority of overages are due to user error. These errors would just be shifted to include quota mistakes, which can incur data or service loss. Usage limits might be softer than monetary limits which are bounded by the time dimension, but can still cause problems since they do not discriminate between good vs bad traffic. Before you go around calling people lazy, I suggest you put more thought into why creating more options for people who are overwhelmed by options is generally not productive and can cause unintended consequences and expose liability. With some more thought, you'll also realize that AWS is optimized for businesses and, as stated, losing customers or data is much worse than paying a higher bill, which can always be negotiated after the fact.

fauigerzigerk 6y ago

I want all services to be rate limited. What I don't want is for some runaway process (whatever the cause) to bankrupt me before I can respond to any alerts (i.e within hours). In other words, I don't necessarily need to set a hard spending limit, but I want to set a hard spending growth limit (allowing for short bursts), either directly in monetary terms or indirectly through rate limits on individual services.

ngcc_hk 6y ago
I avoid those for the sane reason. I do not mind to pay for a few dollars for side projects. But not unlimited bill.

donmcronald 6y ago

> Shutdown your servers? Wipe your SSDs and storage buckets? Remove your DNS records? Should it be permanent? I'd be absolutely fine with that in a sub-account or resource group as long as I had to enable it. A while back I wanted to try out an Azure Resource Manager template as part of learning something. Since I was _learning_ it, I wasn't 100% positive what it was going to do, but I knew that it should cost about $1 to deploy it. With a hard limit on spending I would have set it to $10, run the thing and been ok with the account being wiped if I hit $10. Even $100 I could tolerate. Unlimited $$ was too risky for me, so I chickened out. The worst part is I can't even delete my CC because it's tied to an expired trial that I can't update billing for. > Also for most customers, the data and service is far more important than the cost. So don't enable the hard limit.

manigandham 6y ago
Since the vast majority of errors are user error, this is just another potential disaster waiting to happen.

imtringued 6y ago

>Shutdown your servers? Wipe your SSDs and storage buckets? Remove your DNS records? Should it be permanent? If not then they're just subsidizing the costs. If it's soft-limit then its just a warning, and if you just want a warning then billing alarms already exist in every cloud. You know. When I hit the storage limit of my SSD it doesn't wipe my data. It just ceases to store more data. When I rent a server for a fixed price and my service is under a DDOS attack then it will simply cease to work for the duration of the attack. If there is a variable service like lamba that charges per execution then lambda can simply cease to run my jobs. You can neatly separate time based and usage based charges and set a limit for them separately. It doesn't even need to be a monetary limit, it could be a resource based limit. Every service would be limited to 0GB storage, 0GB RAM, 0 nodes, 0 queries, 0 api calls by default and you set the limit to whatever you want. AWS or Google Cloud could then calculate the maximum possible bill for the limits you have chosen. People will can then set their limits so that a surprise bill won't be significantly above their usual bill. Your comment is lazy and not very creative. You're just throwing your hands up and pretending there is no other way even though cloud providers have created this situation for their own benefit.

manigandham 6y ago
The vast majority of overages are due to user error. These errors would just be shifted to include quota mistakes, which can incur data or service loss. Usage limits might be softer than monetary limits which are bounded by the time dimension, but can still cause problems since they do not discriminate between good vs bad traffic. Before you go around calling people lazy, I suggest you put more thought into why creating more options for people who are overwhelmed by options is generally not productive and can cause unintended consequences and expose liability. With some more thought, you'll also realize that AWS is optimized for businesses and, as stated, losing customers or data is much worse than paying a higher bill, which can always be negotiated after the fact.