Amazon, in my experience, has issued organizations a one-time credit in cases of surprise bills.
The bigger crux of the issue, is Amazon has democratized CapEx into OpEx, and it's too easy to be ignorant of the details of infrastructure planning, which is rolled into AWS pricing.
Before AWS, IT teams had to plan for and estimate costs prior to procuring hardware. This is no longer needed with ondemand, programmatic infrastructure.
Engineers, who (reductively) focus on solving business problems with code, aren't necessarily thinking about the costs of deploying their solutions, the way Ops and IT would be.
- There's almost no demand for it from the majority of their customers.
- Billing code is a big, scary, tangled mess and also happens to be the one area where you really can't afford to introduce bugs and make mistakes, so meaningful change is already exceptionally difficult.
I already got a surprise, because in one place it says t2.micro and t3.micro instances are free for twelve months.
But, if the instance runs Windows, or the zone is this or that, or something else I don't know, the only free tier instance is actually the t2.micro.
And then there's the Unlimited option, and CPU credits, where if your CPU use goes over 25% for some time, it will either: Be throttled so slow as to be useless, or, not being free and you still have to pay for each hour of use.
And that's just the beginning!
What I need is clear and upfront documentation about pricing, before the bill comes.
I didn’t say anything about this at all. It would certainly be a nice feature, and one people have asked for since the very beginning of AWS.
> Since they don't, if you are literally so concerned with your current costs for this month, you can set a budget and alerts for whatever you want, so that you don't exceed some cost.
Again, this is a strawman. This isn’t a response to anything I said.
If you’re trying to understand how much a new deployment on AWS is costing you, and find ways to optimize that, you don’t care about the total budget of the account, or having some auto shutoff. You need detailed, real-time information from Amazon, which I’ve never seen in the console.
It’s been several years since I’ve had to be digging around in the billing console, so I have no stake in this discussion and things might have changed. Based on other comments being made around here, I really doubt anything significant has changed.
I was just trying to clarify a comment you completely misunderstood.
No one who is working on this cares about real-time by the second data - the daily cost is enough.
> Again, this is a strawman. This isn’t a response to anything I said.
OK, what are you trying to say? If my response above did not answer the question, can you give me a one sentence summary of the point?
>> I was just trying to clarify a comment you completely misunderstood.
Alternatively,
“The billing UI and billing infrastructure is a major weakness of AWS when it comes to helping people understand what their usage will cost.” You can clearly see this is true by the large number of people who complain about it.
Since they don't, if you are literally so concerned with your current costs for this month, you can set a budget and alerts for whatever you want, so that you don't exceed some cost. Also, they show you your current cost for this month, up until the moment, as well as a daily breakdown of your costs.