> Many people would enable it, forget about it, and footgun themselves on the other side.

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.

Because the downside for a company isn't "oh it was off overnight" it's "we finally hit it big and made zero sales because AWS shut us off".

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.

Alternatively it's "we would have made a profit this month but a bug in this one service chewed through our budget in one hour". Sure, you might be able to get a refund, but that's no way to plan a business.

I’d think if your rate of spending is >$50/hour then that’s nearly-always a bug. The only reason this conversation is taking place is because serverless “infinitely scales”. Autoscaling physical instances has a max limit for similar reasons.

I've experienced plenty of scenarios where costs have quite legitimately spiked.

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.

Given how easily they reimburse customers, I suspect it's intentional - one can be "fixed after the fact" and the other can't - if your site goes down during a slashdotting and you lose sales, etc, there's no getting those back, but if you inadvertently run costs high, they can just refund/cancel those costs.

Azure HAS this hard limit feature already.

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.

The first is obviously customer error and unless you're posting to get laughed at, you're likely not to gain traction.

(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).

If you drop a laptop, that's customer error. You break something or do something unintended that damages it, that's customer error.

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".

They 'might' reverse those fees, they might not. You are at their mercy and mercy is finicky.

That’s literally the point I made :)