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Comment by tcgv | Hacker News Reader

Amazon provides Billing Alarms for monitoring charges, which is very useful for anticipating unplanned cost surges:

- https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitori...

Alarms are like a garage leaving you a voicemail message before doing $25k of repairs on your car. It’s ridiculous that I can’t set a hard cap on my spending.

I guess you could have the SNS topic invoke a lambda that shuts down the specific service if you wanted that but I agree a budgets feature would be nice, especially when provisioning test accounts for developers.

Fine and dandy, but you can't use Lambda in fedramp.

You can't use most aws things in fedramp scope.

On the flip side I would never want my real business to shut off. Hobby project yes! Real business no,

AFAIK it's already considered a best practice to set up separate accounts for development and production (https://blog.codeship.com/separate-aws-production-and-develo...). Having a hard cap on an account dedicated to development would help a lot IMO.

Assuming your revenue and your AWS bill are strongly correlated, I agree. However, when a free service or a bug can increase costs by orders of magnitude without a corresponding increase in revenue your choices are to eat it (not sustainable, for most of us), throttle, or stop. Throttling is hard, so stopping is often the best choice.

Disagree there, for a paid business.

If my business had 100k in revenue per month. Normal cloud spend is 2k per month.. some glitch made spend go to 2k a day. That sucks, and I hope I have good alerts to catch it within a day or two.. but telling my customers "screw you, bill messed up" for however long it took me to sort out the bug? I would not do that.

Sounds like the oomkiller. Sounds good in theory until it starts shooting processes in the head that you didn’t intend.

What would you like Amazon to do for stateful services? Should they stop and delete EBS volumes? What about databases? Simply shut them down? What happens when you lose data or it doesn’t come back up?

EBS volumes have a size, so there's an upper bound to the cost. Most of the storage is predictable, so if I try to allocate storage where the monthly cost of the raw storage is (ex) 10x my budget, I wouldn't have a problem with the request being denied.

For non-storage resources like EC2, network bandwidth, etc. I'd be fine with having a hard limit where everything just breaks, especially for stuff that's not production.

There could also be better, self managed quotas on resources. SES is a good example. AFAIK the quota is all or none across the entire account. IMO, it's not a good idea to give a user that needs to send (made up numbers) 1k emails per day credentials that can send 250k emails a day.

I have 3 AWS accounts. I don't keep anything in my main account. It's for billing only. I have a sub account for production that I try to keep pristine. I have a sub account for development and testing. It's the development account that scares me. I spend less than $50 per month. I'd rather have my whole development account de-allocated than get a bill for $1k.

As with all things just having the option would be nice, but it does not mean it is useful or a good idea for everyone to use it.

For personal stuff I would much rather a kill switch than a nasty surprise. For _some_ businesses, that is probably the wrong decision though.

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