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Comment by VectorLock | Hacker News Reader

Its not expensive for them, its expensive for their customers. If you went over your spending limit and they deleted all your shit, people would be absolutely apoplectic. Instead they make you file a relatively painless ticket and explain why you accidentally went over what you wanted to spend. This is an engineering trade-off they made to make things less painful for their customers.

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There is a huge difference between deleting data and stopping running services.

You're right in that there's a few services that expose this complexity directly, the ones where you're paying for actual storage, but this is just complex, not impossible.

For one thing, storage costs are almost always static for the period, they don't scale to infinite in the same way.

If it’s a web server, sure. But if you drop data because you’re no longer processing it, or you need to do an expensive backfill on an ETL, then turning off compute is effectively the same as deleting data

If I ask Amazon to turn my lambdas off if I breach $500, and they turn my lambdas off when I breach $500, I won't be mad at them, I promise.

Why would I apoplectic at Amazon if I set “turn my shit off after it has accrued $10 in charges” to TRUE and they actually followed what I asked them to do?

Is it a serious question? Because then I could have you shutdown just by posting a call to ddos with a link to your search form on an anime image board.

You can freeze the account vs you can give someone a hundred thousand dollar bill?

If you did this to a vps the instance might be unavailable until the traffic slows down but up after.

Trust me you would rather they freeze your account.

OK? Good! That's what I want to happen! I want that. I do not care if some weirdos on an anime image board can't access some image. I don't want my credit card maxed out.

Is that not a serious request? I play around in the same big-boy cloud as some SaaS company, but I'm on the free tier and I explicitly do not want it to scale up forever, and I explicitly do not want to destroy my credit or even think about having to call Amazon over a $100,000 bill because I set my shit up wrong or whatever. I want it to shut off my EC2 instance once it has used up whatever amount of resources is equal to $X.

Obviously any world with this feature would also feature customizable restrictions, options, decision trees, etc etc. I don't think anyone is or was suggesting that someone's SaaS app just gets turned off without their permission.

They could add it as an optional limit. If it's on and is exceeded, stop everything. Surely the geniuses at Amazon (no they really are, I'm not joking) can handle it.

What about the space you're using? Do they delete it? Remove all your configurations? Prevent you from doing anything with your account until you up your limit or wait until your month resets?

If you're worried about getting a big bill, and you don't care if it gets shut off when you're not using it, why don't you shut it down yourself?

AWS made the tradeoff to keep the lights on for customers and if there is a huge bill run up unintentionally and you contact them with it they refund it. I've never experienced them not doing this when I've run up five figure bills because of a misconfiguration I didn't understand. I don't think I've ever even heard of them not refunding someone who asked them for a refund in good faith.

How many times has AWS refunded you a five figure bill? I've heard stories from people who got refunded but were told that it would be the first and last time they would get a refund.

I think I'm up to two five figure bills and two six figure bills refunded for various companies/clients. On one account, we had about $70k refunded, then a year or two later $130k. The normal monthly spend was closer to $30k.

There were no warnings or "don't do it again". They, very reasonably IMO, asked us to essentially explain how and why this happened and how we'd stop it happening again. They then provided some additional guidance and resources around those areas. In the one case where the charges were due to compromised credentials, they asked us to rotate all of our access keys before they issued the refund.

Completely anecdotal and slightly dated information, but that's been my experience.

Thanks for the anecdotes!

What do they do when you don't pay your bill.. they freeze, notify and delete after period of time.

If you try adding files that will result in a larger bill than your limits over the billing period you warn and refuse.

So simple.

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