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Concerned about cost overruns? Set up a Billing Alert! You can get an email if your bill exceeds a certain amount. Set it at $5 maybe? It's 2021 and t

• sleepychu 5y ago
  Do you think it's an important feature for their paying customers? I've worked at places that care a lot about their AWS bill but I don't think any of them would have wanted a genuine hard stop before they'd do anything about it as a result of the soft alerts.
  • geoduck14 5y ago
    I've used AWS for my personal projects and at work. When I started at work, I didn't fully realize that "when an EC2 is spun up, you are charged for 1 hour, even if you terminate it" - so I accidentally racked up a big bill. I was thinking it would be useful if Organizations could pre authorize users at $X before preventing them from doing more - of course the better solution is to manage releases through a pipeline that checks for stuff created and code scanning and... whatever In the end, we use cost monitoring, but no AWS billing alerts
  • reaperducer 5y ago
    Do you think it's an important feature for their paying customers? I think it is. A few jobs ago, the boss of my boss got fired for a cloud service overage. Not a huge amount; the number on the grapevine was around $10,000. But it was enough. For many (numerically "most," probably) companies, the IT department is a black box to upper management, and any unexpected budget overages are a serious problem.
• hughrr 5y ago
  Yeah. By the time you have woken up and read your billing alert email it’s too late. However the reason it doesn’t exist I suspect is twofold. Firstly because it is bad business. All the cloud providers make a lot of money from mistakes and small things sapping cash. Secondly it’s hard to rationalise what to do when the budget runs out. What do they nuke?
  • woofcat 5y ago
    Would it be that hard to build some cost overrun plans? If threshold (x) hit then do: - Email me - Stop Servers XYZ - Leave Servers ABC running. If threshold (y) hit then do: - Email me / Call me - Shut everything down.
    • phone8675309 5y ago
      Shared hosting providers from the late 90s onward typically had systems like this standard.
      • thatwasunusual 5y ago
        I'm pretty sure they didn't have to potentially call as many clients as today. :)
      • partisan 5y ago
        Both AWS and shared hosting providers run on a “F you. Pay me!” model. The difference is that small hosting resellers knew they couldn’t collect on debts while Amazon knows it can.
      • thak788 5y ago
        If your talking about crappanel exceeded bandwidth suspension page it wasn't realltime, can't remember if default was 1hr,6hr, 24 though
        • lostcolony 5y ago
          Even if not realtime, it sounds like a better option than AWS' current "not supported at all; you'll have to manually shut things down if costs overrun".
    • geoduck14 5y ago
      >Shut everything down Ok. But the Auto Scaling Groups are free - so I can keep that on, right? Oh, look! They just launched more EV2s, how convenient. Should I back these up to S3? With CRR enabled? Tee hee hee
• eddieroger 5y ago
  You don't get to be the biggest by not charging people. They probably make more off accidental billing than the people who contest those accidents, so it's worthwhile. That's why Columbia House was so hard to cancel back in the day - it wasn't the $0.01 CD where they made the money, but on the monthly fees that were way more than the cost of one CD.
  • 7sidedmarble 5y ago
    I don't think it has anything to do with wanting to collect money from accidents. That's not very reliable revenue anyways. That's just an unfortunate side effect for us plebs. The real reason is that if you give companies a budget feature, they will inevitably, you know, use it. They'll set a budget that seems 'reasonable', and then freak out when everything turns off when it's exceeded, and then go raise it a little bit, and repeat the cycle. Compare that to now where every place I've ever worked basically seems to forget that cloud hosting costs even exist, based on how much most companies balk at paying for simple SaaS tools for developers but will happily let the hosting costs grow to astronomical amounts. They're happy to do it cause they just see a line item and accept it. If you give them budgets, that won't happen any more.
    • reaperducer 5y ago
      That's not very reliable revenue anyways. At the scale of Joe's Chicken Shack, accidental revenue is not reliable. But at the scale of a Google or an Amazon, while it will fluctuate month to month, a certain minimum revenue stream should be statistically predictable.
    • eddieroger 5y ago
      >I don't think it has anything to do with wanting to collect money from accidents. That's not very reliable revenue anyways. It's worked well enough for the entire fitness industry forever. No reason it can't work here as well, and at scale I'm sure it's pretty profitable. You're right, too, that we'd use it, but I think this is a situation where we can both be right.
  • imglorp 5y ago
• aliswe 5y ago
  Not that easy to do. I don't think any major users are requesting this, and what to do when you go over the limit? Start deleting resources automatically? What about the data? Backups? It's just not that relevant ...
• StratusBen 5y ago
  [Disclosure] I'm Co-Founder and CEO of a company named http://vantage.sh/ http://vantage.sh/ that helps developers track and reduce cloud costs - I also previously worked at both AWS and DigitalOcean. We hear about this all the time from AWS customers and its a large reason why people connect their account to Vantage which will help alert you if costs change intra-month. The first $2,500 in AWS costs per month are tracked for free so I thought I'd mention this here for potentially being helpful to the community. If you don't want to remember to set up billing alerts, we provide basically a turn-key experience around this that takes less than a few minutes to setup: http://vantage.sh/ http://vantage.sh/
  • thak788 5y ago
    What type of iam perms does this require?
    • StratusBen 5y ago
      When you sign up and verify your email you will see the provided CloudFormation template found here for auditing of IAM permissions: https://vantage-public.s3.amazonaws.com/x-account-role-create-1630352308.json https://vantage-public.s3.amazonaws.com/x-account-role-creat... The list of permissions is a whittled down version of what's available in the AWS managed policy of "ReadOnlyAccess" and doesn't allow us to do things like read from S3 Buckets or read from RDS instances. Basically just List/Describe actions. IAM permissions are written about more here in our documentation and are ultimately handled gracefully if you want to remove some. For example, if you just want to hand Vantage access to billing, S3 and EC2, it will do the job as best it can with just those permissions: https://docs.vantage.sh/permissions/ https://docs.vantage.sh/permissions/ Finally, here's a blog post on our cross account IAM setup: https://www.vantage.sh/blog/how-vantage-uses-cross-account-iam-roles-to-securely-connect-to-customer-aws-accounts https://www.vantage.sh/blog/how-vantage-uses-cross-account-i...
• N00bN00b 5y ago
  You can just deploy your own solution. And that one can be selective, which is probably preferable anyway. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/ce/get-cost-and-usage.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/ce/get-cost...
• marcinzm 5y ago
  The users who actually pay AWS decent money or are likely to pay AWS decent money in the future don't ask for this afaik. People paying $5/month for AWS aren't AWS's target audience and likely contribute negligible revenue to AWS. People do ask for alerting and monitoring but that's not a hard stop. Then you get complex issues such as S3 and EBS. As long as there is data you will keep paying so what do you do? Have a hard limit but not really since it doesn't cover them? Delete people's data?
• geoduck14 5y ago
  >It's 2021 and the biggest cloud platforms still don't have hard limits on spending. Look... just be happy that they made it PAINFULLY obvious when you make S3 buckets public
  • mdaniel 5y ago
    Have you visited their S3 console recently? It's gotten pretty striking visual markers now for Public visibility. I don't have a screenshot handy, but thought I'd mention it
    • geoduck14 5y ago
      Sorry, I phrased my comment poorly. AWS makes it clear when buckets are publicly visible. This is a good thing, and I am grateful
• hellbannedguy 5y ago
  It's by design. Those guys in finance know there are people whom will pay any bill. When I was younger I would just pay for even mistakes because I was concerned with my credit number.
  • tinalumfoil 5y ago
    If you mistakenly spend a small (to AWS) amount of money, they'll refund it. They're not out to get individuals. AWS is for businesses and hard limits on spending is a liability for their pricing structure. Imagine you run a small business built on AWS and you hit your limit -- you're basically asking AWS to dismantle your business. They'd have to null-route traffic directed to you, shut down your servers, delete your data, de-allocate your IP addresses, etc. Your business won't be any better off than if you went bankrupt from a huge AWS bill.
    • trutannus 5y ago
      Or Google. When I was a student I forgot about a TPU instance and spent over $10K in a single month, on track for $100K. Google refunded me since the server was at idle for most of that month outside the one hour I used it for.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• corty 5y ago
  GCP has budgets that can be easily configured and enforced.
• tgtweak 5y ago
  Use a disposable credit card (like lastcard or privacy) and set the limit to $5. Add it to your account, and the max they can charge is $5. If they let you run past it, the billing will fail, and if they don't shut it off it's on their dime. To everyone claiming "ohhh that's illegal/unethical" I say to you: take it in your favor for once. For every 100 clients aws bills unexpectedly and with no controls in place to mitigate, you can be the 1 who gets a free month of service. They will not pursue you for $5. Imagine making the argument for welfare on a company that is worth a trillion dollars.
  • dangus 5y ago
    This is a good way to just get banned until you pay. AWS bills work a lot like postpaid phone bills. When you use the service you agree to pay the bill for usage. Your suggestion is kind of like saying “If your card declines you don’t have to pay for your meal.” Not really true. In my experience AWS support has been good about reversing accidental/fraudulent usage charges and helping to prevent them in the future.
  • aaronjl 5y ago
    The only problem is that they'll let you go negative for awhile before they shut you off. Then they won't let you use any services until you pay your balance. So unless you're willing to make a new account each time you go over your $5 max, you'll still be paying for the extra usage
  • humanistbot 5y ago
    > To everyone claiming "ohhh that's illegal/unethical" I say to you: take it in your favor for once. The rationale against doing this is as much practical as it is moral --- unless you're just doing this once for a single month and don't care if your account gets banned. AWS isn't like an auto-renewing subscription, where if the card declines, your service is cut off. They won't charge the card with a $5 limit until the end of the billing period. If you rack up more than $5 in charges in a billing period, you will be in debt to Amazon. They will certainly ban your account, so you'd have to make a new throwaway account with a new disposable CC each month.
• asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
  I wonder why nobody has a service to receive these billing alert emails and react to them by shutting down your AWS entities.
• VikingCoder 5y ago
  I'm sure it's a terrible idea for some reason, but I love the idea of setting up a service with a wallet that pays for itself. Anyone can add funds to the wallet. As long as the wallet has funds, the service keeps running. I especially love the idea of the provider (AWS, GCE, Azue, whatever) setting up the wallet, and guaranteeing there's no way to withdraw from the wallet, so you know the funds you deposit really do go to funding that service. Then, give the service a way to see which account has deposited funds, so they can credit you for funds you deposited... I mean, I would just love to see more services running "self-funding" like this.
  • ricardbejarano 5y ago
    BunnyCDN works like that. I prefer to be billed whatever it costs but have my service up all the time.
• deleted 5y ago
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• unoti 5y ago
  Azure has quotas that can limit things such as the number of VM's you can have running per region. It won't provision more vm's than you have in your quota. This helps you, for example, avoid automatically provisioning more vm's than you expect. These quotas can be edited manually or via API. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-resource-manager/management/azure-subscription-service-limits https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-resource-manage... https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-resource-manager/management/azure-subscription-service-limits https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-resource-manage...