Perhaps AWS should have "personal/developer" accounts that have this enabled by default and continually warn you about it, whereas "company/enterprise" don't have them.
Yeah, but I figure as long as Amazon doesn't immediately remove stored data, the damage of the footgun would be minimal. Speaking for myself, of course, I'd rather have a short outage than an unexpected thousand dollar overnight expense. It seems so trivial that it's unclear why AWS would not implement this feature. The only explanation that makes sense is that they want these surprise bills to occur.
Given how easily they reverse the bills, I suspect that they have a policy of doing it (perhaps a few times per account, something to prevent abuse) because they really don't want to trigger the above scenario.
Ultimately whatever solution you put in place, someone is going to complain about it. At least with the system they currently have in place they can reimburse customers. Whereas it is a lot harder to fix their reputation after they've automatically stopped production services.
Ive seen nobody on HN, twitter, reddit complain about "my site was down during heavy business since i turned on hard billing setting". Not a single person.
However, I see frantic after frantic post of "I was testing something on AWS and it caused me a $X000 or $X0000 bill."
But as the posts in here are apt to suggest - you can always beg AWS support for a reversal. Great plan there.
(Also one could make the "nobody uses Azure" joke here.)
Personally I think that much of AWS is "way overpowered" for the normal person/business, and you shouldn't be playing with it if a $X0k bill would be impactful (as likely other solutions are much better tuned to your needs and money).
When you are handed a tool that has multiple hidden guns and explosives inside of it, and ends up blowing your foot off is malfeasance of the people who handed the tool to you.
AWS is that tool. And given that Azure can implement these guard-rails and AWS chooses not to tells me all I need to know.
> Personally I think that much of AWS is "way overpowered" for the normal person/business, and you shouldn't be playing with it if a $X0k bill would be impactful (as likely other solutions are much better tuned to your needs and money).
Please compare and contrast this with "Learn AWS for furthering your career".
Unless you're a big company, "we stopped your function in the middle of the night" is a whole lot better than "we ran your function all night and you owe us $4k".
AWS already has a recourse for incidents like these: refund the spend. That is far more reliable than trusting an organisation can tolerate an outage.
If that alert triggered earlier (and $300 would have been triggered in an hour), my all accumulated charges would be only $400 not $4500.
So the hard learning here is that CloudFront charges takes time to appear on your bill, up to 24 hours.
For example, it's totally understandable that the alarms can be specified per region, why shouldn't it be like this?
Also the global AWS billing $300 alert seems to have worked but you were asleep as far as I understand. If it was a call-out style alert, then you would've noticed in the middle of the night and could've stopped it.
The only thing I agree is frustrating is this: > CloudFront includes the AWS Shield Standard feature, but somehow, it was not activated for this case (Lambda@Edge calling itself via CloudFront).
Maybe you can argue that you weren't made aware of this but idk... keep us updated