Comment by chimeracoder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chimeracoder | Hacker News Reader

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This is very hard for them to do.

For example, what if you have set up a bunch of auto-scaling instances to handle heavy load. During the middle of the night, your application suddenly goes viral in Indonesia or Brazil or some other large country in a different timezone from yours.

Your bill goes over its threshold - what does Amazon do? Do they terminate some of your instances (potentially losing production data!)?

The problem is that the exact times that "intelligent" bill-limiting features are likely to be used are the exact instances in which they could have absolutely disastrous impact if they make a mistake[0]

I haven't experienced this myself, but I've heard Amazon is actually rather lenient when it comes to waiving fees for clear mistakes (accidentally provisioning an expensive instance that you didn't mean to) - their customer support is supposed to be very good, though I have not had to use this myself.

[0] By "mistake", I mean that they are following your instructions correctly, but your instructions happen to be incorrect for handling this situation.

Yea any intelligent bill limiting needs to be done with context into what each instance is doing. It's possible for them to implement something that can handle that, using tags and such, but I would rather they spent that time improving reliability infrastructure.

It's not terribly difficult to implement one's own bill limiting system using the API.

It seems impossible for a single solution here. One business would rather see instances go down, another might need ledger logs no matter what and would rather turn down customers at the door, etc.,

The right way to do it (currently) is to model the costs yourself and tie it in with your operational automation, then determine what your best course of action would be during a shitstorm. Generally, I would wager the best option is to replace your front page with a static html "overwhelming response" page, maybe with some light vector graphics.

> Do they terminate some of your instances (potentially losing production data!)?

If you have opted in for the "don't let me spend more than $x," then yes.

I'd say the more intelligent way to head any of this off is to create billing alerts which you can now do and set it to page / email / post to an endpoint when you reach $X or X% of whatever worries you.

Create tiers of things that email / SMS additional people as the numbers go up if you want to be very careful etc...

I'd second that! It's not complicated, especially for smaller entities. "I'll use your services, but don't go over ths amount; without authorization." If my wiz, bang app, website has that much potential--I'll get the money to you. I don't want to wake up to a big bill. To be honest, if they were very clear about pricing, and stop/loss orders; I think more people would sign up. It's about honesty, and a minimizing the variables. Oh, and fire any MBA advisors; they think they are slick, but your average dude us starting to look at the fine print, and has become very sensitive to being taken advantage of. By the way, off topic, but relevant. I looked into esurance. Very good price. Then I realized the premium was only fir six months. I always wondered how they could afford all those rediculous commercials.

6 months is industry-standard quoting for auto insurance -- not sure why, but it is. What product are you talking about?

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