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Wow, it's really interesting to read how clueless folks are here on HN. The reality is kortilla is the same person that if AWS deletes all their data when they

Wow, it's really interesting to read how clueless folks are here on HN. The reality is kortilla is the same person that if AWS deletes all their data when they hit their "cap" to stop the billing will be on here complaining. Payment method not go through? Hit your cap? To stop charges AWS needs to delete forever almost everything in your account. All your S3 data gone. All your backups / databases and archives gone. Oh - you actually DON'T want them to blow up your platform? Maybe they could provide instead a billing console https://console.aws.amazon.com/billing/home https://console.aws.amazon.com/billing/home or maybe alerts and alarms? https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/monitor_estimated_charges_with_cloudwatch.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitori... Cost or usage budgets (and many more)? AWS Budgets (includes alarming options). Some folks seem to have almost no clue about what AWS customers who pay the billions want. Is there ANY chance that AWS listens to its paying customers? Maybe has become successful by doing so (at the cost of total feature sprawl in my view?). My quick trick is to login a day or two after I think things are shut down and look at projected bill and current month billing. I've left some very large instances running a time or two, easy to turn off. And with billions of requests (PER SECOND) on the aws network, there is NO WAY they are doing real time billing. That is not happening. Look for daily aggregation and similar. Just the scale of permissioning on API calls must be insane per day. These are going to need to be doing local counters that aggregate periodically. I do wish they'd maybe aggregate 4x per day (6 hours).

tdhoot 5y ago
This seems like a strawman. You could almost definitely ask/warn the user when they set the cap, or you could make the cap not apply to anything that is not trivially recoverable.
- onphonenow 5y ago
  Than the billing will continue
- whoknowswhat11 5y ago
  They have this with their cost explorers, alarms, budgets and more. Realize that most customers are more focused on will their data be preserved. Blowing out your entire EC2 / RDS / S3 / Glacier backup stack over a billing issue (or someone setting a cap up in the accounting department) makes no sense. Are major customers really asking for this? Why risk it, why even build a tool that can blow out a customers setup so completely. This is why I don't understand HN sometime saying AWS is "BS" etc. Does HN not thing AWS talks to their big customers to find out what they want?
easton 5y ago
They should go talk to Azure then, because Azure for Students gives you $100 per year. The second you hit that $100, it kills everything. I’m not saying it would be simple, but it wouldn’t be a bad idea to have a global monthly billing maximum where it’ll nuke the account at that number. There’s lots of new developers that are probably too scared of the free tier to use it without something like that (I have AWS experience, and I don’t use it for personal stuff specifically because that doesn’t exist. Which means I probably won’t tell my employer to use it either).
- Godel_unicode 5y ago
  You have to see how that's both totally different and a terrible idea for a business, right? If anything the existence of hard limited student accounts combined with the fact that support always* refunds giant surprise bills underscores the point that caps for business accounts don't exist because of the damage they could do.
  - pyrale 5y ago
    > and a terrible idea for a business Surely it's the customer's role to decide whether or not it is a bad idea? How 'bout you run a non-profit and have an allocation to run the services, would you prefer your nonprofit to lose the website for a couple days, or for it to go bankrupt? What if you run a company for which online presence is a means of advertising and not the revenue-generating platform, would you prefer to run your advertising campaigns on a budget or without limits? And so on.
- whoknowswhat11 5y ago
  I do like this idea, but for their bigger customers a cap where billing (and services) all stop is not what customers are asking for. Instead they are asking for durability / resilience / object locks etc. I'm serious, what large businesses wants to lose EVERYTHING (all static IP's, all glacier and S3 data, all database and compute) over a billing issue.

tdhoot 5y ago

This seems like a strawman. You could almost definitely ask/warn the user when they set the cap, or you could make the cap not apply to anything that is not trivially recoverable.

onphonenow 5y ago
Than the billing will continue
whoknowswhat11 5y ago
They have this with their cost explorers, alarms, budgets and more. Realize that most customers are more focused on will their data be preserved. Blowing out your entire EC2 / RDS / S3 / Glacier backup stack over a billing issue (or someone setting a cap up in the accounting department) makes no sense. Are major customers really asking for this? Why risk it, why even build a tool that can blow out a customers setup so completely. This is why I don't understand HN sometime saying AWS is "BS" etc. Does HN not thing AWS talks to their big customers to find out what they want?

easton 5y ago

They should go talk to Azure then, because Azure for Students gives you $100 per year. The second you hit that $100, it kills everything. I’m not saying it would be simple, but it wouldn’t be a bad idea to have a global monthly billing maximum where it’ll nuke the account at that number. There’s lots of new developers that are probably too scared of the free tier to use it without something like that (I have AWS experience, and I don’t use it for personal stuff specifically because that doesn’t exist. Which means I probably won’t tell my employer to use it either).

Godel_unicode 5y ago
You have to see how that's both totally different and a terrible idea for a business, right? If anything the existence of hard limited student accounts combined with the fact that support always* refunds giant surprise bills underscores the point that caps for business accounts don't exist because of the damage they could do.
- pyrale 5y ago
  > and a terrible idea for a business Surely it's the customer's role to decide whether or not it is a bad idea? How 'bout you run a non-profit and have an allocation to run the services, would you prefer your nonprofit to lose the website for a couple days, or for it to go bankrupt? What if you run a company for which online presence is a means of advertising and not the revenue-generating platform, would you prefer to run your advertising campaigns on a budget or without limits? And so on.
whoknowswhat11 5y ago
I do like this idea, but for their bigger customers a cap where billing (and services) all stop is not what customers are asking for. Instead they are asking for durability / resilience / object locks etc. I'm serious, what large businesses wants to lose EVERYTHING (all static IP's, all glacier and S3 data, all database and compute) over a billing issue.