It’s not unreasonable to ask for a mechanism to not be billed thousands unexpectedly.

Cloud billing is not easy to understand.

I would know, I work for the part of AWS that calculates people’s bills.

It's not rocket science, either. I would know, I work for premium support.

Every time I see an unexpected bill of thousands of dollars, it's because the customer poorly architected their infrastructure.

People seemingly want the freedom of complete control without the responsibility that comes with having that much control.

> If your database hits your cost limit, do you stop serving requests? Delete the data? To what extent do you want 'cost protection' for resources you signed up for?

Sounds like a reasonable configurable option rather than “you shouldn’t be able to choose at all”.

I am sympathetic to the concern about cost overages--I've hit them in AWS before--but given the way that developers and managers think about SaaS products (generally, not just cloud stuff), I tend to think that even if you required them to click three checkboxes and sign their name in blood, the first time you vaporized somebody's production database because they hit their overages and didn't think it would ever happen would be apocalyptic. And the second, and the third. And you're at fault, not the customer, in the public square.

By comparison, chasing off "cost conscious" (read: relentlessly cheap--and I note that in my personal life I'm one of these, no shade being thrown here) users is probably better for them overall.

Work in AWS Premium Support. This is 100% how it goes.

Take KMS keys for example. You can't outright delete a KMS master key; you have to schedule it for deletion. The shortest period you can schedule for deletion is 7 days (default 30). Once the key is deleted, all encrypted data is orphaned.

Guess who gets blamed for deleted keys?

HINT: It's not the customer.

I used to run an AWS consultancy, which is how I know. ;) More than once I had a customer go "well support won't help me, how can I get my data back?". And I had to tell them "well, support isn't just not helping you for kicks, you know?".

I am sorry, I might be missing something, but I call bullshit. How much does it cost for Amazon to store several bytes that make a key? 5 cents per decade?

“Yeah, so uhm, you hit zero, so we deleted all your keys in an irrecoverable way, sorry not sorry” — is not a circuit breaker. Make all services inaccessible to public and store the data safely until customer tops up their balance. That’s how VPSes have worked forever.

I don’t argue that “cheapo” clients are worth retaining for AWS, clearly they are not. But this kind of hypocrisy really triggers me.

Edit: a helpful person below suggested I misunderstood the parent, and I now I think I did.

AWS doesn't retain anything for you unless you tell them to, and when you tell them to delete something (as in the example relayed by the person you are replying to), they delete it as best as they are able. That's part of the value proposition: when you delete the thing, it goes away. Why would they start now for clients who want their bills to be in the tens of dollars (when if you really care you can do it yourself off of billing alerts[0])?

Going to be real: you aren't "triggered", which is actually a real thing out there that you demean with this usage of the term. You're just not the target market and you're salty that it's more complex than you think it is.

[0]: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitori...

I'm pretty sure they meant that the customer schedules it for deletion and then blames AWS when they can't access their encrypted data.

Oh, in this case I misunderstood what the parent meant, and I replied to a wrong interpretation of their words.

Thank you for the clarification.

Stop serving requests until the finances are rectified, delete the data 30 days after it stops. Final migration out/egress requires a small balance for that purpose.

The engineers designing and building these systems are some of the best in the world, this is relatively trivial.

There is absolutely nothing trivial about this.

Relatively trivial. In other words compared to the rest of the infrastructure and billing system this is nothing.