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This is absurd. I just logged into the billing alerts console. I set up a total billing threshold in 90 seconds: https://console.aws.amazon.com/billing/home?#/

This is absurd. I just logged into the billing alerts console. I set up a total billing threshold in 90 seconds: https://console.aws.amazon.com/billing/home?#/budgets/overview https://console.aws.amazon.com/billing/home?#/budgets/overvi... What on earth are you getting at?

prirun 5y ago
You can setup whatever alert threshold you want, but it doesn't stop charges from accruing. What is needed is a way to say "I only expect charges of $10 or less per month. If charges go over that, disable the account until I can get in there and find out what is happening."
- SavantIdiot 5y ago
  That can also be done. I can shut down any specific or cluster of EC2 instances if any one exceeds a $ limit, or all of them. The resolution is up to me and I immediately stop getting charged. If I have lost ROOT access, as the OP did, nothing can save me: all alerts and thresholds can be shut off by the hacker. Just like any other system.
  - prirun 5y ago
    I saw that part about setting up quotas and actions when budgets are exceeded. I did setup an email alert, but the quota thing was extremely complex. There was a list of service quotas a mile long just under the EC2 section. Some of them were automatically set by AWS, most of them were zero. This is clearly aimed at companies with a huge AWS infrastructure investment and the staff to manage it, not some schmuck individual like myself that just wants to not get a $45K bill.
    - SavantIdiot 5y ago
      Again, the $45K was due to a hack of root credentials. Not AWS being shady. If anyone got access to root on your machine you'd be screwed. If a total shutdown when aggregate monthly budget is triggered is insufficient, and fine-grained quotas are too complex, you probably shouldn't be in the cloud because Azure and Google are equally complex. Or do you like another cloud-computer service better than AWS because their budgeting quota systems are better? Please share, I'd like to know what you use.
      - prirun 5y ago
        > If a total shutdown when aggregate monthly budget is triggered is insufficient I never said that. In fact, that's what I'd prefer. I don't use AWS for anything critical, only for testing, so I'm fine with my account getting temporarily disabled or all requests returning error codes. > Please share, I'd like to know what you use. B2. B2 has a 10GB free tier for object storage and returns an error code if that limit is exceeded without a credit card on file. They have limits (called Caps), like AWS, but B2 apparently automatically sets their limits low, because when I checked, my limits are $1, $5, $1, $1. Pretty sure I never set these. They will email or text when limits are exceeded by 70% and 100%. As far as I can tell, they don't have a hard limit (return error codes) once a credit card is on file like they do with no credit card on file, but I think that would be a good thing to add.
jerf 5y ago
Have you ever visited the page before? The message explicitly says that because this is my first time they need 24 hours to set it up. I can only report what happened. Why this couldn't be preloaded for my teeny tiny account and its probably on the order of dozens of kilobytes of data is something you'd have to take up with Amazon, not me.
lamontcg 5y ago
Yeah good luck with anything other than e-mail though, if you want SMS notifications you have to go through setting them up through a layer of indirection through AWS SNS messaging. And it'd be nice to just have a $100/month killswitch on my personal AWS account and I have no idea how possible that is with their actions (which seems to require configuring IAM accounts). I don't run anything "production" there and I'd be happy to have all my shit suspended if that dollar figure was exceeded, but fuck if I know how to do that without taking a week to catch up on the past decade of how to manage infrastructure with AWS. It may be simpler to just suspend my AWS account entirely. I think I only have some ancientsauce mysql backups on S3 which are costing me a few pennies a month.

prirun 5y ago

You can setup whatever alert threshold you want, but it doesn't stop charges from accruing. What is needed is a way to say "I only expect charges of $10 or less per month. If charges go over that, disable the account until I can get in there and find out what is happening."

SavantIdiot 5y ago
That can also be done. I can shut down any specific or cluster of EC2 instances if any one exceeds a $ limit, or all of them. The resolution is up to me and I immediately stop getting charged. If I have lost ROOT access, as the OP did, nothing can save me: all alerts and thresholds can be shut off by the hacker. Just like any other system.
- prirun 5y ago
  I saw that part about setting up quotas and actions when budgets are exceeded. I did setup an email alert, but the quota thing was extremely complex. There was a list of service quotas a mile long just under the EC2 section. Some of them were automatically set by AWS, most of them were zero. This is clearly aimed at companies with a huge AWS infrastructure investment and the staff to manage it, not some schmuck individual like myself that just wants to not get a $45K bill.
  - SavantIdiot 5y ago
    Again, the $45K was due to a hack of root credentials. Not AWS being shady. If anyone got access to root on your machine you'd be screwed. If a total shutdown when aggregate monthly budget is triggered is insufficient, and fine-grained quotas are too complex, you probably shouldn't be in the cloud because Azure and Google are equally complex. Or do you like another cloud-computer service better than AWS because their budgeting quota systems are better? Please share, I'd like to know what you use.
    - prirun 5y ago
      > If a total shutdown when aggregate monthly budget is triggered is insufficient I never said that. In fact, that's what I'd prefer. I don't use AWS for anything critical, only for testing, so I'm fine with my account getting temporarily disabled or all requests returning error codes. > Please share, I'd like to know what you use. B2. B2 has a 10GB free tier for object storage and returns an error code if that limit is exceeded without a credit card on file. They have limits (called Caps), like AWS, but B2 apparently automatically sets their limits low, because when I checked, my limits are $1, $5, $1, $1. Pretty sure I never set these. They will email or text when limits are exceeded by 70% and 100%. As far as I can tell, they don't have a hard limit (return error codes) once a credit card is on file like they do with no credit card on file, but I think that would be a good thing to add.

jerf 5y ago

Have you ever visited the page before? The message explicitly says that because this is my first time they need 24 hours to set it up. I can only report what happened. Why this couldn't be preloaded for my teeny tiny account and its probably on the order of dozens of kilobytes of data is something you'd have to take up with Amazon, not me.

lamontcg 5y ago

Yeah good luck with anything other than e-mail though, if you want SMS notifications you have to go through setting them up through a layer of indirection through AWS SNS messaging. And it'd be nice to just have a $100/month killswitch on my personal AWS account and I have no idea how possible that is with their actions (which seems to require configuring IAM accounts). I don't run anything "production" there and I'd be happy to have all my shit suspended if that dollar figure was exceeded, but fuck if I know how to do that without taking a week to catch up on the past decade of how to manage infrastructure with AWS. It may be simpler to just suspend my AWS account entirely. I think I only have some ancientsauce mysql backups on S3 which are costing me a few pennies a month.