>A HN user reports a story of someone who burned 80 grand overnight by provisioning bunch of EC2 instances for testing and leaving them on. So, ~$5000 per hour

>A HN user reports a story of someone who burned 80 grand overnight by provisioning bunch of EC2 instances for testing and leaving them on. So, ~$5000 per hour? Either a company cares about $5000 per hour, or it doesn't. If it doesn't, then it doesn't care about $120,000 per day either. If it does, then WTF were they doing running a cluster at $5,000 per hour? And by definition, anyone who wants to launch $5000/hour or EC2 instances, isn't able to rock up to a COLO or IT department and say "I need 1,000 96 core Intel boxes for a couple of hours." Literally any other provider that can give you that service will require that you sign up to pay for $5,000 per hour, for how ever long you want to run them. There's nobody running a service that you go inside and ask for $20 on pump number 3. You're giving them a credit card, and then you're asking for an instance limit increase. The author thinks this is a damning indictment of AWS when a small amount of analysis shows the killer feature underneath. It's what people want: to spend cash, immediately, on compute. So when I was working at a startup, and I asked our COO to request an instance increase (to 250 instances, backed by his credit card) I made damned sure that I didn't "leave the cluster on". And that cluster gave us 2,000 cores! We couldn't have afforded to buy 250 servers! Finally, when this happened to a colleague at a different company, we reached out to AWS and they refunded the money. Because if a company allows a developer to launch a $5,000/hour cluster, then that company is already spending a lot on AWS, and will certainly spend a lot more in the future.