I’m not saying it would be simple, but it wouldn’t be a bad idea to have a global monthly billing maximum where it’ll nuke the account at that number. There’s lots of new developers that are probably too scared of the free tier to use it without something like that (I have AWS experience, and I don’t use it for personal stuff specifically because that doesn’t exist. Which means I probably won’t tell my employer to use it either).
I'm serious, what large businesses wants to lose EVERYTHING (all static IP's, all glacier and S3 data, all database and compute) over a billing issue.
Surely it's the customer's role to decide whether or not it is a bad idea?
How 'bout you run a non-profit and have an allocation to run the services, would you prefer your nonprofit to lose the website for a couple days, or for it to go bankrupt?
What if you run a company for which online presence is a means of advertising and not the revenue-generating platform, would you prefer to run your advertising campaigns on a budget or without limits?
And so on.
Realize that most customers are more focused on will their data be preserved.
Blowing out your entire EC2 / RDS / S3 / Glacier backup stack over a billing issue (or someone setting a cap up in the accounting department) makes no sense.
Are major customers really asking for this? Why risk it, why even build a tool that can blow out a customers setup so completely.
This is why I don't understand HN sometime saying AWS is "BS" etc. Does HN not thing AWS talks to their big customers to find out what they want?
The reality is kortilla is the same person that if AWS deletes all their data when they hit their "cap" to stop the billing will be on here complaining.
Payment method not go through? Hit your cap? To stop charges AWS needs to delete forever almost everything in your account. All your S3 data gone. All your backups / databases and archives gone.
Oh - you actually DON'T want them to blow up your platform? Maybe they could provide instead a billing console
https://console.aws.amazon.com/billing/home
or maybe alerts and alarms?
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitori...
Cost or usage budgets (and many more)?
AWS Budgets (includes alarming options).
Some folks seem to have almost no clue about what AWS customers who pay the billions want. Is there ANY chance that AWS listens to its paying customers? Maybe has become successful by doing so (at the cost of total feature sprawl in my view?).
My quick trick is to login a day or two after I think things are shut down and look at projected bill and current month billing. I've left some very large instances running a time or two, easy to turn off.
And with billions of requests (PER SECOND) on the aws network, there is NO WAY they are doing real time billing. That is not happening. Look for daily aggregation and similar. Just the scale of permissioning on API calls must be insane per day. These are going to need to be doing local counters that aggregate periodically.
I do wish they'd maybe aggregate 4x per day (6 hours).