"Oh cool, I'll set a $1k cap, never gonna spend that on this little side proj." Fast forward a year, the side proj has turned in to a critical piece of the business but the person who set it up has left and no one remembered to turn of the spending cap. Busy christmas shopping period comes along, AWS shuts down the whole account because they go over the spending cap, 6hr outage during peak hours, $20k sales down the pan.
Of course it is technically the customers fault but it's a shit experience. Accidentally spending $72k is also technically the customers fault and also a shit experience. I don't think there is an easy solution to this problem.
"Oh cool, I'll only scale to 1 server, never gonna see high load for this little side proj."
"Oh cool, I'll deploy only to US West 1, outages are never going to matter for this little side proj."
There are a million ways to be out of money as a company. Why should this be any different? Why is the singular particular instance one where it is simply intolerable to accept that users can screw things up?
There are lots of things that are "shit experiences" that are consumers fault.
There is an easy solution. Give consumers the option and let them deal with the consequences. There are enough valid reasons to want hard caps on spending that it's crazy to not make it available because "Someone MIGHT accidentally set the limit too low which will cause them an outage in production that MIGHT mean they lose money"
What? Why wouldn't this just be an opt in thing? It could even be tied to the account being used. It's not like AWS accounts are expensive or hard to setup.
If a user opts in to the "kill if bill goes too high" and they kill a critical portion of their business, then that's on them. Similar to how a user choosing spot instances if their spot ends up being destroyed. You've already got that "I can kill your stuff if you opt into it" capability.
> On the other hand retroactively forgiving the cost of unexpected/unintentional usage doesnt impact the customers users.
Yeah, and what happens if someone isn't big enough to justify AWS's forgiveness? What if they get a rep that blows off their request or is having a bad day? You are at the mercy of your cloud provider to forgive a debt, which is a real shitty place to be for anyone.
> And with billing alerts the customer is able to make the choice of whether the cost is worth it as it happens.
And what do they do if they miss the alert? You can rack up a huge bill in very little time the right AWS services.
The point of the kill switch cap is to guard against risk. The fact is that that while 72k isn't too big for some companies, it means bankruptcy for others. Its because you might want to give your devs a training account to play with AWS services to gain expertise, but you don't want them to blow $1 million dollars screwing around with Amazon satellite services.