Re:A Surprise AWS Bill
by Turing_Machine on Sunday July 26, 2020 @11:26AM
(#23957716)
> Maybe that should be an option?
It should absolutely be an option.
Maybe not the default, but an option.
I certainly would like the "don't book me over $X" option, but the devil is in the details. Perhaps just turning off where's would help, but if you account is compromised and 50 servers are running trying to mine crypto, the hacjer won't turn off those servers just because it's no longer submitting results... So AWS should probably stop all your servers.. which means users might lose data... Makes it a difficult choice
Maybe that should be an option?
Probably not a good idea for a business but if you're just using AWS to learn and otherwise fool around with, there's a good argument that it would be nice to be able to have a hard circuit breaker for at least stateless services.
I've actually heard people argue that they consider everything they put up on AWS is ephemeral so a hard circuit breaker should have the option to burn everything down but that seems like it would create its own set of problems for many people. Disabling data egress and EC2 seems as if it would go a long way towards stopping most of the unexpected bill stories.
And, yes, I'm aware of billing alarms and even setting up Lambda functions to take actions but, especially if you use S3 to host files, it would be nice to cap expenses at mostly your storage costs. I was doing some research for a very small non-profit that needs some hosted storage and I think Backblaze B2 is a better choice for them for this reason.