AWS bill capping feature request thread still unanswered after 10 years
forums.aws.amazon.comMy understanding is that this is a difficult problem to solve "perfectly" due to lag between incurring a cost and recording the cost.
I believe GCP currently has the best feature for this. You can set both billing alerts as well as caps. However, I also believe that it can take up to 24 hours between incurring a cost and it showing up on your billing report. So even on GCP (which is the most forward-thinking cloud service for this feature), you can incur up to 24 hours of charges over your maximum billing threshold cutoff. I'm also not 100% sure if GCP's billing threshold is really designed to be a "hard cap" per se.
The real question is whether AWS should let perfect be the enemy of good; and/or whether providing a somewhat "broken" service like GCP's would mislead customers into feeling more protected than they actually are.
See here where someone set a Firebase billing budget of $7 but an infinite recursion generated $72,000 in charges. When the founders started seeing the charges come in, all they could do was watch as it grew and grew....because their screen was merely reflecting what had already happened in hours past.
https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/10/google_cloud_over_run...
Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25398148
That is an argument for why these overages occur. It isn't an argument for why customers should eat that cost rather than Amazon. In fact Amazon is in a much better position than customers to absorb those costs. Sure, they'd have to increase rates slightly to cover it. But it would give customers peace of mind.
And if the costs become exorbitant, Amazon is in a better position to improve their own systems to reduce the amount of overages that people run into in practice.
In theory, Amazon's first leadership principle is Customer Obsession. (See https://www.amazon.jobs/en/principles for the full list.) If they took that seriously, then setting this issue to rest for their customers would be a no-brainer.
> In fact Amazon is in a much better position than customers to absorb those costs
And if you call amazon support and talk to them, especially as an individual, you might get your bill cancelled.
you might get your bill cancelled
The "might" in your post is doing a lot of work.
FWIW I know of a startup whose video sharing app was used to reshare a pay per view football match and they incurred a $30k bandwidth bill that AWS did not cancel. That killed the startup. It was largely their own fault for not securing the platform well enough, or moderating popular streams, but being able to cap their AWS bill would have kept them in business..
I am not going to risk runaway costs in hope that Amazon "might" cancel it.
Though, apparently population both caring about it and avoiding Amazon as result would pay less than cost of implementing it and not refunded income from catastrophic runaways.
I would argue that AWS does not have a "Customer Obsession", and that's exactly why it's Amazon's most profitable business (by far) and the underwriter of all of Bezos's ambitions.
Disclosure: AWS employee. Support specifically. There are good things about my employer. There are bad things about my employer.
AWS does indeed obsess about the customer. Every step along the chain there is someone there advocating for the customer. There are mechanisms to keep the customer in mind even for the developers who actually code the service and don't talk to customers on a daily basis.
I've had many, many service team members shadow me as I worked their service's tickets. This is explicitly so they can see in real time customer pain-points. If a customer has a question about a unique use case, the service team will proactively reach out to support engineers to set up a call to discuss the use case further. There are monthly (or twice-monthly) meetings between support service owners (i.e. those people in support who 'own' a service) and service teams to identify the top issues customers are having with the service. AWS is constantly looking for ways to better assist customers, make support less difficult for customers, increase self-service options for customers, etc.
I'm really, really curious where the basis behind your argument. Because from everything I've seen and been a part of, it's simply untrue.
$0 ingress charges and >> $0 egress charges make AWS roach motel.
So basically you're complaining about pricing? Unlike other cloud providers, AWS has never had a price increase for a service. Just decreases.
I guess 'customer obsession' would be giving away everything for free?
Customer obsession would be things like implementing bill caps on new account creation.
Customer obsession would be NOT shipping buggy, unreliable software like AWS Amplify.
Customer obsession would be CloudFormation-first.
Customer obsession would be not forcing me to upgrade to a paid Support account to report a bug.
The list goes on, unfortunately. I do believe AWS employees mean what they say, but the external reality (IMO) is it takes a lot of time and effort to get AWS to notice their customers unless you're one of the big boys.
Bill caps sound great until you leave one on on a production system and your whole business comes crashing down during a spike in customer traffic.
Customer obsession means not shipping bugs? OK, Bob, let's see your code.
CloudFormation is wonderful and essential. But AWS clearly optimizes for delivery speed. SOME service customers want Cloudformation from day 1. Others would rather have the API first, and have CFN a few months later.
> Bill caps sound great until you leave one on on a production system and your whole business comes crashing down during a spike in customer traffic.
Hence the "ask on account creation". If I want a dev account, I can choose to cap it. The amount of SMB that would benefit from this is staggering.
> Customer obsession means not shipping bugs? OK, Bob, let's see your code.
A major difference being that my company isn't worth $1T+.
I've used AWS for a long time and spoken at length with many wonderful, intelligent people in the company; and I didn't mean to tread on anyone's toes, I just wanted to express how it feels as a customer who spent >£150k/month for half a decade.
Amazon is in the news right now for employees making tone-deaf dishonest public statements trying to deflect legitimate criticism. Out of respect for your employer, please stop.
I am an AWS employee as well, and I'm definitely one of the biggest critics of the company. That being said, AWS is definitely still customer obsessed.
I feel dirty defending AWS, but this is one case I'd give them the benefit of the doubt. There must be _a_ reason they haven't implemented this yet and that reason must be somehow protecting the customer. "Customers want this" ends the discussion around here. You must have a really good reason to disagree.
Unpredictable $30K charges protects the customer?
Like $35 bank overdraft fees protect the customer from not getting a candy bar.
Should they simply automatically eat the costs then it would undoubtedly result in abuse. Just look at GitHub Actions.
Oh I didn't think I was starting 1000 instances of miners in the EC2 GPU cloud, it certainly exceeded my configured budget, please give my money back..
"You can only launch 1 concurrent EC2 instance per $100 on your max cap, if you want to launch 1000 instances of EC2 your max cap needs to be set to at least $100.000, or to $unlimited".
There are many solutions to this problem to prevent abuse. All of which are way better for consumers than the status quo of everybody having an $unlimited spending limit.
That's where "if the costs become exorbitant, Amazon is in a better position to improve their own systems to reduce the amount of overages that people run into in practice" comes in.
If starting 1000 instances exceeds your configured budget, they could simply not start them, and shut down whatever number of instances you managed to start as soon as their cost exceeds the budget.
I guess the question is how precise monitoring and reactionary system Amazon wants build for this, for an arguably marginal use case anyway; they do already provide Amazon Budgets for automatic actions when exceeding budgets, but it's quite not as real-time. And then making the niche cases favor the customer is an invitation to abuse.
But least all Amazon accounts are tied to a credit card, so abusing in a scale similar to e.g. the GitHub case is not that easy.
It's trivial to add a clause that says "If you add a cap to the cost of your account you can only have 3 concurrent instances."
Don't give your customers unlimited margin and leverage then. See also: Archegos.
> Oh I didn't think I was starting 1000 instances of miners in the EC2 GPU cloud, it certainly exceeded my configured budget, please give my money back..
All AWS accounts start off without the ability to do this (via the quota system) and being able to start 1000 ec2 instances of any type is a setting that needs to be unlocked via a support request (which can never be done by that support person, but always needs to be escalated to the "service team" and takes about 1 business day).
As I posted last time this came up here:
This is a billing question, not a technical question, and looked at through that lens it's easy to put a hard limit on a monthly bill: just don't ever issue bills greater than that amount. If I say I only want to pay a maximum of $1000 a month, and I hit that limit but it takes a bit for the provider to shut everything down so really $1100 of resources were consumed, then the provider eats the $100 overrun and I get a bill for $1000.
With an actual hard limit you create a financial incentive for the provider to minimize this overrun. Yes it might be difficult to fix but I assure you, if hard limits existed, the technical issues would be solved soon enough because now there's a reason to invest in a solution.
GCP doesn't support a cap, only alerts. You can use those alerts to implement your own cap mechanism, same as how it works on AWS except AWS billing is only on a one hour delay I believe so I'd say AWS wins here.
App Engine used to support caps. They're no longer supported, because for every customer pleasantly surprised, there were five customers incandescent with rage that their service had gone down at the worst possible moment due to a spike in actual demand.
Ho do you know?
I can easily believe it, and I can easily believe that AWS employees have heard such stories, but I'd love to have it be more than an anecdote.
I could equally well believe that they got rid of it because it affected the quarterly earnings report and there was maybe one customer who was "incandescent with rage" that the caps they put in place worked exactly as advertised.
Well... most cloudy limits only affect current operations. If you add a limit to the number of VMs running you might experience service degradation for a while, until you learn to cope with new peak demand by increasing your quota or being more efficient.
That raging customer might well assume that because almost all limits are like that, all are, including the new S3 limit, but the S3 limit causes service degradation forever, not during peak load. The writes that failed for a while map to reads that'll fail forever, because that data isn't there.
We can come up with possibilities that sound more or plausible. I'd love to hear something more factual.
Indeed, here is GCP's own guide which confirms what you say and provides a hacky way to implement a cap mechanism.
https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/notify#cap_disa...
We talked about caps with the Google reps at my day job.
The short answer was 'we can, but don't want to' (note : this may be completely unrelated to what Google thinks internally, and is just what the fairly high up the food chain rep told us)
I'm using caps right now, they work- it shuts down all resources attached to the billing account if it goes over. There are many levels of alerts before it hits that though.
its on the "total spend" of a billing account level though, and obviously you'd have to be a billing administrator, so to work with it would is awkward; many billing accounts across disparate projects is basically the only way.
My understanding is that this is a difficult problem to solve "perfectly" due to lag between incurring a cost and recording the cost.
It's impossible to solve perfectly with tech.
Amazon saying "If you put a number in this form we won't charge you more than that, but your account will be limited by <list of limitations> and if you go over those limits then <long list of conditions that will apply if you go over the limits up to and including removing you from the platform if AWS think it was fraudulent>" is a perfect solution.
The only reason why there would need to be a perfect tech solution is if AWS are concerned about giving people a small amount of service that they're not able to charge for. AWS clearly believe protecting themselves from overages is more important than giving customers peace of mind that they're not going to be hit with a huge bill. That's a reasonable position for a business to take, and they're completely free to do it, but you can't also argue that customers are wrong to avoid deploying to AWS because they're scared of a surprise bill.
This argument ("it's not implemented because it's to difficult to do properly") was debated ad nauseam in the past. Well, look how others implemented it and you will see how to do it.
A simple example: S3. Currently, what happens when you exceed your credit card limit is that they send you an email they weren't able to charge you but they continue to provide the service for the next two months, and during that time everything works fine: you can access your buckets and you are charged for storage and transfer.
Now, what would happen with hard caps implemented? You didn't pay, so you're locked out of your account. Nobody can access your S3 objects, including yourself. If you care enough about them, you need to make a payment and settle your account. If you don't do it within one month, the whole content will be deleted.
But does it need to be solved perfectly? Change my mind, but I don't believe anybody, garage nerd or small startup, would be affected if they overshot their planned costs by 10%. I really need a solution when my bill gets by (my) mistake 100x bigger. And I'm convinced AWS could so easily solve this - if they cared to.
There ought to be a "emergency shutoff" threshold, period. And there's just no customer-centric excuse for not implementing it after these many years.
Here's how to implement it:
"Amazon, what do you do today if my credit card fails and all the retries fail?"
Do THAT if billing hits <my emergency off switch threshold>.
Will it disrupt the heck out of all my AWS services? Of course. That's the point, if something went so seriously wrong that my billing hits an absurd level that will put me out of business, I'd rather have downtime.
At one point, I owed a balance of $0.57 to AWS and started to get warning emails about my account being suspended. Just out of morbid curiosity, I waited to see what would happen.
2.5 years later, after dozens of automated mails, they finally suspended it.
The challenge is that there is a lag between consuming the resource and counting the price.
Seems like yet more "let perfect be the enemy of the good" thinking.
If you want a cut-me-off set to $X, and some lag might allow charges to reach X+Y before the cutoff took effect, which is the customer-centric answer:
a) don't offer ANY cap, simply let the customer's out of control charges just keep racking up to catastrophic levels that put them out of business?
b) cut it off as soon as you DO detect it exceeded their cut-me-off threshold even if by that point it has reached X+Y?
Just offer to switch existing usage to flat rate services instead of consumption based services. This isn’t rocket science. We know how to control costs.
Cloud vendors obviously don’t want this.
There are no billing limits, but there are resource limits set by AWS upfront. I had to create many support cases to raise this or that limit. (for example we had a limit if 100 concurrent lambda workers, then 2.5k if I remember correctly). Some number of active ec2s, some total TB of storage etc. We were hitting those limits pretty frequently despite spending over £50k per month with them (mostly dev and test services).
I'm pretty sure that AWS' service quotas exist more as a guardrail to prevent customers from accidentally spinning up 1000 instances instead of 10, which would not only leave you with an eye-watering bill, but affect resource availability for other customers.
They're usually quite happy to increate the quote if you contact support.
Most limits exist within what AWS has determined is 'normal' usage. Once you pass that, you can request a service limit increase.
Service limit increases are typically only denied when raising the limit would negatively impact the availability of the service (noisy neighbor issues, for example), or if the customer is needing a limit increase because they're trying to use the service in a way it wasn't designed.
but Azure has a cap? if MSFT can do it, what is preventing GCP or Amazon to do the same.
and it takes GCP a day to report billing to consumer. they can monitor the data earlier than that, and stop the services early
are you sure Azure has this?
i looked into this a year ago and there was no such thing available (there is https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cost-management-billi... but that is not really a spending limit, it's more like in some cases you get credits from microsoft and when you have spent all the credits they stop things for you). i mean a system where you pay monthly what you consumed, and you can set a limit, and the provider guarantees that you do not have to pay more than the limit.
but maybe i overlooked something, so if you know more about this, please tell.
btw. fly.io has a kind-of spending-limit, you can preload some credit into the account and when that is spent you are relatively safe ( https://community.fly.io/t/can-i-set-a-billing-limit-per-mon... )
Pay up front. Offer services up to total accumulated paid amount.
I understand that there's an endless number of edge cases that are hard or impossible to solve here. But the unlimited potential charges eliminate AWS for certain scenarios.
I would not use AWS for private stuff because of this, it is simply not worth it to risk huge bills to me personally. Of course what I might spend on AWS is peanuts, but it could translate into using AWS with my employer because I'm familiar with certain parts of it.
And even professionally this is kind of a risk, especially if you're working for a small company. And even more if you're not that experienced with AWS, there's a lot of parts to it and it can be really hard to figure out what is costing you money exactly, if you're not an AWS expert. I once created a relatively small, but noticeable charge on AWS due to a recurring script transferring a lot more data than intended. With my limited knowledge it was pretty much impossible to figure out the exact source from AWS tools. I more or less stumbled upon the issue randomly while looking into this, which is kinda scary to me.
All this does make AWS less attractive compared to classic hosting/renting a server, if that fits your use case and the lesser flexibility isn't an issue.
As a junior developer I'm always afraid using any AWS service to make a mistake that cost me a lot of money. I'm not talking about millions, simply 2k would be really bad for me.
Anyone who is personally liable for the the bill should be terrified of AWS. It's enough to lose your business to a usage spike, much worse to lose your home and car.
I struggle to consider a scenario where setting up a limited liability organisation wouldn't make sense, even if only for interacting with Amazon.
Is there any record of Amazon going after people (and not companies) for unpaid bills?
More often than not, I hear stories about how AWS support zeroed out the bill instead.
"I may lose my home and all savings" is scary enough that just possibility of that happening legally is enough for me.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22719573 and the rest of that thread just makes me clench up.
As sibling reply also says, even if they do eventually zero it out, do you want to owe the richest guy on the planet $100k? He has law firms like you have pairs of socks.
Obviously everything I'm saying goes for unlimited-billing cloud infrastructure, where your customers (or your mistakes) generate cost out of view.
I had been in the same position for about ten years until I set up a limited liability company. It does take some effort to set up and costs about $20/month[1], but to me the peace of mind is well worth it.
[1]: https://www.ukpostbox.com/address/business-address-service
A limited liability company may mean you're personally not liable, but your business can still be made bankrupt which isn't much better.
The cost to own an LLC varies a lot on jurisdiction. Even in the USA, it can vary considerably from state to state.
Also they link to a business address service, which isn't a business. Actual cost of just owning a business in the UK is £13/year
This is insane that a user has to setup a separate company just to protect themselves from sudden bills that may be not their fault.
You really need to implement limits service-by-service, and with as many services as AWS has, it would make sense if some of them hadn't implemented limits yet.
Think about the details... if you are paying something for both storage and bandwidth, and get a sudden surge of bandwidth, do you really want items in storage to be deleted? You basically never want storage to be automatically deleted even if your program suddenly uses a surprising amount; limits on its maximum size and alerts are much better.
But once you realize that bill capping doesn't make sense for storage, well, many different services are essentially some type of storage. This is a feature that sounds good but in practice what people really need is something slightly different.
> But once you realize that bill capping doesn't make sense for storage
I'd think you want something like a circuit breaker.. steady costs or slowly increasing costs aren't like to be a problem, but a sudden surge in costs is what I'm concerned with.
Perhaps if it operated like a time-averaged quota.. don't let me incur _new_ costs if I slide too far out of my apparent range. Give me a knob to control that range or temporarily disable it, and maybe a way to monitor those events so I can react to them appropriately for my particular application.
I don't think you ever want storage to be deleted as part of an automatic bill cap system. Just refuse access, or allow reads but not writes until the customer reviews it. There's even an HTTP code for it: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/402 (non standard, but I know for a fact it's used by Azure).
Actually deleting things should be done after a period of time specified in writing in the contract with the customer, and I'd hope you'd try to contact them first.
But I think an automatic bill cap absolutely makes sense for storage, and I can't really see any reasons it couldn't work.
> and I can't really see any reasons it couldn't work.
You’re assuming the existence of a function which can extrapolate the daily/monthly/etc costs.
If I upload a 10GB file at $0.10/gbmo, how much will it cost me? We have no idea because we don’t know how long it will be up there.
We have a process that downloads and streams massive reports into S3, then a process is immediately kicked off to handle processing and importing. As soon as that completes, the files are deleted.
So we’re paying about 0.04 months of storage every month. The naive solution is estimating 1.00. You’re off by a factor of ~24.
We could... not handle that. Now we’re in a situation where we’re consistently spending $100/mo on storage, set a liberal $150 budget and immediately everything breaks. We actually needed to set a $2400 budget! Expecting a $100 bill and getting a $2400 bill some month when something goes wrong is as good as doing nothing.
You’re also going to need to account for the interaction of every single object in a bucket and the lifecycle rules set which is an absolutely ridiculous amount of overhead.
Now extend this to... literally every one of the seemingly bazillion AWS services.
The only cap that’s going to be easy and realistic to implement without a crystal ball is a hard cut-off once you’ve actually accrued the charges, and a “shut down all my servers, delete all my data, and just close my account” cap is useful to almost no one.
If you want useful caps they need to be aware of your workload. The best person to implement those is you. The tools are there.
You're over complicating things, I'm not assuming the existence of any magical function (other than the one Amazon already uses to calculate your bill). All I want is to be able to say "I do not, under any circumstances want to spend more than $X per month on this service." Amazon just needs to keep track of usage, and start rate limiting/returning 402s/blocking writes when the monthly limit is hit.
If I estimate I'm going to need to spend $400 a month on my bill, then I might set a limit of $800, send me an email warning when I'm getting close, I'll go in and work out why I'm consuming much more than I expected. If I don't hit the "let me exceed my billing limit this month" button then stop the service. (but don't delete any data, I'm not sure why so many commenters seem to think this is a necessary step).
Amazon is capable of calculating how much to charge you every month, so they're capable of doing this too. No fancy estimation required.
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So under your example - I upload my 10gb file, but some bug in my processing code means it doesn't get deleted and sits there for a while. Maybe I don't notice and it sits there for a few days instead of a few seconds, but Amazon sends me an automatic email because my usage this month so far is X% higher than the average of my last Y months.
Ideal scenario: I go in, investigate, delete the file and temporarily increase my billing cap just for this month.
Not great, but okay scenario: I don't notice the email, a few days later and I'm at ~2x my previous months bill (or whatever limit I've set up), amazon automatically starts returning 402s when I try to access my storage service. I am happy because this is still much better than getting a bill for 10x my previous amount at the end of the month instead.
> Amazon just needs to keep track of usage, and start rate limiting/returning 402s/blocking writes when the monthly limit is hit.
You're accruing costs even if you stop reading and writing. You're paying for the on-going storage, running of instances, etc.
What you're describing does not implement what you're describing it as.
E.g.,
It's the first day of the billing cycle, so our bill is effectively $0. So no limits in place on writing/rates/etc. We upload 100TB of data. No rate limiting or blocking because our current bill is under the $800 limit.
By about the 8th of the month, we've now hit the $800 limit you set. If you don't go hit the "let me exceed my billing limit" then you want Amazon to "stop the service".
You want:
This is not possible. There are two paths forward here:1. Under no circumstances to spend more than $800/mo. 2. Your data to be retained.
You're asking for Amazon to provide you services and just not bill you for them if you don't want to pay for them. This isn't going to happen.* Amazon retains your data: You need to continue paying for storage. Your bill at the end of the month will be ~$2200. Fails #1. * Amazon "stops the service" (storing your data) and under no circumstances exceeds $800/mo in charges: They delete your data. Fails #2.Alternatively, if you want them to not accept a write if it _would_ have led to you being over your budget, see my original comment about predicting the future.
You're twisting things. Amazon can alert you of the storage use and threaten to charge you in a few days, not a month. They can give you grace once per year so you're "on notice" after your first goof.
They... already do that.
Billing alerts take two seconds to set up in CloudWatch.
If it's a legitimate goof, contact support and they've refunded me every time.
Glad we're all on the same page then and there's no problem here.
Also interested to hear exactly what part of what I said was "twisting" or misrepresenting the issue.
AWS doesn't run on a magical black box that eats customer money and spits out storage. They absolutely can eat some costs in a minority of cases in order to provide better service to customers (and I'm sure they already do in many other ways).
They are already quite willing to eat costs in cases of legitimate mistakes, compromised credentials, etc for the sake of customer service. I think I've worked with organizations at this point to have a couple hundred thousand dollars worth of bills refunded. The bulk of that was a single $110kUSD bill.
They provide billing estimates and billing data through CloudWatch metrics. This can be used to alert via SMS, email, and other methods. These can be used to trigger lambda functions to implement your own "shut it down" functionality quite easily in a way that actually makes sense for your workload.
What you seem to be advocating for is, more or less, a "pay what you want" model. If they're going to provide services and let you choose the maximum you're willing to pay and expect them to eat the rest, then I don't know how else to describe it.
> You basically never want storage to be automatically deleted even if your program suddenly uses a surprising amount
In most use cases you're right. But never? Not true, not all storage is used the same way. And the thing is, why should Amazon decide which use case is valid or not? I might care more about being able to afford the service than to keep the data around, depending on what kind of service I offer my user. As a platform provider, they should be agnostic, but their greed for money is shining through their willingness to be a true platform provider.
There are rules in S3 to move files or delete them after a period of time.
And perhaps most useful rule is to move them to cheaper tiers of storage. For example, Glacier Deep Archive is super cheap for storage since it's $0.99 per terabyte-month.
Exactly. I have heard stories of bill capping that ended up with infra and data being deleted, so I can really see why they wouldn't implement it. What they could do however would be to allow usage limit based on IAM policies for example (Deny s3:Getobject Condition: monthly bandwidth >= x)
It's never too late. 21 years after being reported, Firefox finally has native macOS context menus in the nightly version.
Ah, maybe in 10 years they'll use the native file pickers.
That would be wonderful on Linux... I would really really love to use my desktop environment's picker which integrates with the rest of the experience and isn't the preschooler file picker UI that firefox defaults to.
I've been using Firefox for a long time (first in its "Camino" guise), but I've never noticed.
"i can't argue, but it's a time thing."
I understand that designing a real-time billing system is near impossible.
But couldn't Google/Amazon simply pretend they have real-time bill capping, and then simply swallow the costs incurred by any delays?
Doesn't seem like rocket science, probably won't cost much, and might bring in new kinds of business (a lot of businesses won't allow most employees to sign an effectively blank check)
To avoid penalizing customers who don't use it, they could make you incur an instant overcharge fee when you go over your limit, say 5% of your limit, which would be pooled to compensate for any extra cost Amazon could need to incur to salvage customer data. Like an insurance, fundamentally.
Now that I think about it, a third party could do this as well... except that if it were built in to AWS there would be much less friction.
It hasn't been implemented because it is nonsensical.
So you hit your limit. Is all your storage deleted? You can't receive an alert because that costs something (even if it's a fraction of a cent) to send. Are your domains forfeit? Audit logs destroyed? There's no reasonable way to implement this. Billing alerts are the best you can do on this problem and I think it would be a good faith move for AWS to enable some by default but a limit just doesn't make sense on any level.
EDIT: Lots of people proposing solutions that work for them. AWS has to think of everyone. And they did. That's why budget alerts exist and you can respond in the way you choose. Everyone's conflicting ideas for how to solve this can be implemented today on top of billing alerts/actions[1]. Case closed.
[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws-cost-management/get-started...
A limit to the cost to me. I don't care what the cost to Amazon is.
> So you hit your limit. Is all your storage deleted?
Easy. Cut access, don't delete the files, set a time limit for resolving the problem before they are deleted.
> EDIT: Lots of people proposing solutions that work for them. AWS has to think of everyone.
No they don't. A feature that solves the main problem for lots of users can be added and for the users that need a complex solution, well, they can justnot use the simple one.
As a small dev, I do not care if data is lost and they stop storing the data/turn off machines. I am more concerned about the cost. I have had two cases.
1. Misconfigured software that we accidentally pushed into production and by the time we noticed it like an hour later we were $100s out. Luckily it was not in the 1000s other that would have sunk the business. 2. An old account of ours got hacked and people spun up like 50-100 servers and it happened overnight and we had a bill of $50k-$70k. Luckily Amazon wrote that off for us. Otherwise I have no clue how we would have ever paid that.
These are usually extraordinary cases, so even if there is a data loss or your servers are shut down, it is a better option than going down the hole with 10s of 1000s in charges.
Nonsense. If you're going to bill for the alert, send it when the charge is the difference between the current bill and the limit.
Of course, it's no more realistic to charge people for the alert than it is to charge them for email receipts. Do you not get those from Amazon?
You implement the feature cap by ceasing to provide the feature once the account is over the billing limit. It is always possible to project the cost of "freeze everything until the end of the month", because there is no unknown information in that scenario. Nothing you've listed is an actual problem.
> You can't receive an alert because that costs something (even if it's a fraction of a cent) to send.
Yea, what a crazy world that would be if AWS just gave each account free stuff like free data transfer for the first gb, or free s3 storage for the first ~100mb
> but a limit just doesn't make sense on any level.
A limit very much makes sense of many levels, just not all of them at once. You're arguing against a hard limit of every single AWS service.
Nobody wants their storage deleted once their budget hits a limit, what they want, and is reasonable to have, is a limit that prevents AWS from spinning additional EC instances. Or a limit that blocks your usage of Textractor. Or many other limits an user could individually set-up for the services where a limit makes sense.
At the very least allow users to roughly define what happens when the threshold is reached: S3 will still store data but maybe not serve anything, Lambdas will still be defined but not run, EC2 instances will keep running, etc. It's not supposed to be a hard cap as in "don't spend a penny more than my $5" but more as in "do everything possible and reasonable so the customer doesn't wake up to a sudden $20k overnight AWS bill".
This sort of possible
> AWS Budgets now allows you to configure actions — responses to cost and usage in your account or set of accounts— that will be applied automatically or via a workflow approval process once a budget target has been exceeded. There are three action types: Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies, Service Control policies (SCPs), or target running instances (EC2 or RDS). Actions can be configured for actual (after they’ve occurred) or for forecasted (before they occur) budgeted amounts.
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws-cost-management/get-started...
You can do this by monitoring billing alerts and automatically shutting down non-critical infrastructure you have. "Do everything possible" is up to a customer to define because it depends on their infrastructure, AWS cannot define this in a way that would make anyone happy.
Having to make some design decisions doesn't mean it's impossible to design.
Budget alerts were the design decision made. You can set up your own infra to listen to budget alerts and cap your own costs. This is a feature that only makes sense to put in the customer's control because a general solution would work for no one. It's a great solution to the problem imo.
This is way too complicated for people who use AWS on a small scale. Maybe if they provided some template to implement that system in the first place?
Anyway, they should be able to protect people from an unexpected $1k charge. Once you deal with alerts triggering automatic infrastructure changes, $1k is likely a value you won't even notice.
This is still a bit low level. You need to think through the policies and they don't affect the traffic. I don't think that's enough for beginners.
Isn't the AWS Budget stuff recalculated only every few hours, or do the alerts somehow get quicker updates?
>Everyone's conflicting ideas
There is no reason why an absolute "don't ruin me financially" button can't be implemented in addition to everything you mention.
>There's no reasonable way to implement this.
Azure VS enterprise credits work this way. 150 hard cap with no credit card on the individual account.
I used rented renderfarms a lot for VFX work. And many of those had a "if your workload stays like it is it will cost you roughly X after n frames rendered"-feature. Otheres made you transfer money first and you would get a warning before that money would run out.
The problem is that you can run into unexpectedly high cost without warning or option to decide whether it is worth it and one of the solutions would be to just tell people when the rate at which they use your stuff increases or decreases by a certain threshold. And because they can bill you, they also know (roughly) what the things that you use cost.
I never used AWS for serious things, but not being able to decide my spending will be a serious argument against it.
The OPs request is for S3. Especially limiting egress fees and allowing some other fees.
> There's no reasonable way to implement this [...] on any level
That's not true (as OP proposes a reasonable way)
You do understand that this is not a binary feature? Not just on or off. The point is not that there should be no costs, but that they should be minimised. This means that data that has to be written, such as logs, should continue to be written and may also incur costs, but everything else should be switched off to prevent you from suddenly being stuck with thousands of dollars in debt.
Resources can be divided into persistent and not. People could opt into "we'll cut off traffic and prevent spawning new resources" limit without affecting storage, domains, logs, etc.
This also aligns well with the "planned vs unexpected" costs.
> AWS has to think of everyone.
Sure. That's why you make it optional. And configurable in a way
But at a very basic idea, blocking new services from being started and throttling of existing ones would go a long way in helping. A very long way.
You can implement this on top of budget actions today: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws-cost-management/get-started...
I have small and medium scale customers that have hundreds of distinct service types in Azure or AWS. Sometimes both. Several have had spending blowouts where a hard limit would have helped.
None have the engineering capacity to figure out how to cap the spending on each one of the individual services, each with their unique and special API.
You're arguing that Amazon can't afford the difficult engineering of spending caps, but the very customers that need spending caps because their budgets are so constrained are so well moneyed that they should all individually be able to invent a solution, engineer it, and manage it?
> There's no reasonable way to implement this.
Oh, really? Azure wants to have a word with you ... Yes, currently they don't enable this for subscriptions with commitment plans or with pay-as-you-go pricing, but it is not because it is not possible or feasible, as you argue - the technical infrastructure in the form of spending limits, spending budgets and quotas is there [1-3] and is available for select plans [4].
[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cost-management-billi...
[2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/partner-center/set-an-azure...
[3] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-resource-manage...
[4] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/legal/offer-detail...
Translation: "We have spending limits, but only for accounts where stopping the spending is important to us. For accounts where the spending is important to you, there cannot be a limit configured. Even though we wrote the code. In fact, we had to add extra code so that we could selectively remove this option."
These questions have reasonable answers, but it's admittedly a very hard problem. Anything that's a request should fail and likely everything else stored etc., should stay as is. It's not perfect, but a lot better.
My feeling with this is potentially where small businesses or startups don't want something accidental to incur a stupidly high bill.
But yes, you could set up alerts to monitor when this is likely to occur. But to do this across each service for each reason your bill might spike drastically might be a challenge.
In the linked article the user was alerted, but they were asleep. One of the proposed solutions is to have usage limits which are calculated based on a maximum monthly cost and AWS will work itself within that.
I feel like this response has to be said every time this sort of thread comes up when someone discusses their unexpectedly large bill.
The worst case scenario is that the user configures their limits in a poor way then turns around and blames Amazon when something breaks in their project and Amazon points back at the limit. It would just be bad all around...so all in all, I think alerts are the best way to do this...
What the hell good is a budget alert when you’ve launched 2000 high memory instances because your programmer screwed up?
Because those alerts are hookable and could shut down the instance.
With delay measured in hours.
There's other things you can use for this, such as CloudWatch Alarms.
And where are your code reviews?
Your comment makes it seem like it’s impossible for Amazon to determine you exceeded the threshold until after you exceeded it. Why couldn’t it work like rate limiting does but for resource consumption not just requests per X time?
That still does not explain why they refuse to answer the question.
This sort of dismissive attitude coupled with a circular justification is the epitome of user hostility, and an unattractive norm in the tech community.
> It hasn't been implemented because it is nonsensical.
If that's the case then why hasn't it been responded to? Is responding also nonsensical?
This is one of the reasons I really like Vultr. They have a simple interface and their pricing has always been solid for me. I don't ever go to sleep worried I'm going to wake up with a $10k bill.
At one of the companies years ago a developer accidentally leaked an API credential on GitHub and the company woke up with a $30k bill.
That's why I don't use AWS. I am sure I forget to disable or enable something and then wake up with life ruining bill. Since they don't want to fix it, it seems like this is still a part of their business model. Maybe this business requires more regulation - if company cannot resolve an issue negatively impacting the consumer, then government should step in and mandate bill capping features to be implemented. Maybe we should start writing to our representatives to come up with something, so companies like Amazon know their place.
This is ironic in a very sad way, considering that Amazon declares customer obsession their top leadership principle [1].
That seems to be an obsession, but in an abusive vein. Here have so many tools and millions of options we made for you, just be careful, it would be a shame if you had to mortgage your house if you forgot to configure something. But we are here for you.
I'm using AWS for my side-project and while I enjoy how cheap it can be, I'm also terrified of it and always have the Cost Explorer opened in a tab that I check every day.
Many comments say it cant be done, but this is disingenious. As if we were bureaucrats with no imagination:
Eg just have 2 caps: First cap triggers a red alarm prohibiting provisioning, or storing, of new data. The second one (when you are like 50% above the first cap) is dark red, closing down everything except storage.
Sure, decisions have to be made for every single service, but you don’t need a perfect solution if it is optional.
Eg, you could start ONLY with EC2 and will have fixed 50% of the problem.
I believe at the very least they could offer a more flexible way of managing Service Quotas.
Currently it's too much of a hassle to increase/decrease account-wide limits: it takes too much time, depends on AWS Support, UX is nowhere as nice as, say instance reservations etc.
As a result of this people tend to increase the limits once in a while just to make sure it doesn't become an issue at a very unfortunate time, and that's it. It never gets decreased/managed again. It's obviously not seen as a use-case by AWS, since they only have a "Request quota increase" button in the UI, and no "decrease" button. [1]
SQ on its own wouldn't cover all kinds of costs (for on-demand items like Lambda executions they offer limits on rates, not total count), but it'd be better than nothing, it'd prevent scenarios where you'd wake up to 100 GPU instances mining bitcoin, and it's within the quotas since Bob asked for an increase two years ago to try something.
[1] Just having a button there would still be an awful UX, yet I believe its complete omission is noteworthy.
Back of the napkin algorithm:
Borrow what DHCP does for leases, but with payment quotas.
First layer is a burst quota, up to that maximum in any spike. This only regenerates when the (monthly?) average quota has enough slack at current that an additional burst can be harvested without the remaining average being under the initial set value. (The math would probably be different, remaining period quota less burst average over time greater than period quota average, but that's the sales description of the concept.)
The second layer is the monthly (or some other period) average for the maximum expenditure allowed.
A billing endpoint would maintain a fractional bucket of spending (divided up as makes sense) but in the case of a single quota consumer would receive an estimate for the period (ideally the burst) and allow up to half of that to be used. At that point it will 'renew' the quota (lease), and flush billing, including sending alerts. If there isn't any further quota the remaining released balance would be consumed and then requests fail.
>Seriously, 10 years unanswered... amazing. You can add +1 to customers lost due to this problem.
that's but a drop in the digital ocean
Do Google/Azure have this?
GCP has billing alerts, and a cap. But it can take up to 24 hours after the cap is hit before you stop receiving new charges in some case so it isn't perfect.
Not sure about Google, but Azure has it with some subscription types but not all. I have an Azure subscription that gets some free monthly credits. When I go over the limit on that subscription, everything freezes until I sort it out.
Microsoft only cared to implement spending caps when it affects their bottom line.
Most Azure services don’t, but Azure Monitor does. I guess it’s easy to deploy something that emits tons of logs or metrics inadvertently, so having a quota might be nice.
I think it’s tricky to implement, though.
How is this going to be implemented?
When it reach the cap, all your service stop working? This is incredibly user hostile.
If you want some warning when utilization is high, it can be relatively easy to setup with AWS's existing feature, but you need to do some configuration/tweaking on your own.
When it reach the cap, all your service stop working? This is incredibly user hostile.
Not nearly as user hostile as the possibility of an unexpected DOS on your bank account while you're asleep.
Which has actually happened to people.
My experience is just one data point but:
My expertise is not at all anything related to web development so when I first tried experimenting with AWS for a side project I was terrified. It was an experiment for me and i didn't care if it deleted the data since the data it was storing was test data I was uploading. However, my budget for my entire side project was $500 and it seemed totally feasible (at least to a first time user of such a service) that some wrong lines in the code could balloon the requests or storage I made. At the time, I didn't even have $5000 of liquid assets and it would have been a nightmare.
That would be substantively less user hostile to me than a massive bill on a personal project, which is easy to see occurring for any number of reasons.
> When it reach the cap, all your service stop working? This is incredibly user hostile.
So set your cap to a very high number, much higher than any amount you expect to be billed. Surely for everyone there is some number at which they would rather their services go down, than have to pay it?
> When it reach the cap, all your service stop working?
That exactly what I would like to have. Services stop and I get time to review what's happened without any stress that my bank account will be emptied.
AWS has both big/small customers, I would say those two have very different priorities when it comes to SLA.
Having a killer switch that could make one's AWS account stop would be a risk for big customers, I would predict, if it is misconfigured, maybe even intentionally. A better solution for them would be alerts, and get things right afterwards.
It will be of course possible to disable that for customers who wish so.
+1 will never use a cloud servcie that doesn't have a hard cap. Not just alerts. Hard cap.
If anyone from AWS is reading this - is there any way we can get multiple devices for 2FA?
Yes this would be a super useful feature especially for dormant accounts. One of my old aws account was recently hacked and racked up bills in thousands of dollars.
The AWS support was super nice and took care of it for me but it gave me some sleepless nights until it was resolved.
If this was a feature I would have most definitely capped my account at 1k (my max bill being $50). They can always send alerts to increase your cap based on projections like it shows in cost explorer. Also since it's an opt-in feature I'm kinda taking responsibility that I'm okay if services are suspended due to hitting the caps.
They could easily factor natural growth and ping you when it feels like bills are getting too close to the cap. Even “bursts” could be allowed x% above the cap if you get an email within an hour.
The lack of caps is just laziness or a dark pattern by Amazon. There’s no excuse to not implement them, it’s not a hard problem.
It's very clear why they are not doing it. Putting the risk on you instead of themselves a) is better for them for obvious reasons, and b) makes it less likely for something bad to happen in the first place.
Also, I can imagine clients worried about this are not the money-making kind of clients anyway.
And if you put it this way, I am not sure why this is not an illegal practice? Companies shouldn't discriminate the access to their services based on the level of anxiety you can handle.
I don't think that's a law.
From the service side...What happens when the user quota resets? You see a flood of traffic to the service. That might trigger anomaly alerts or you run out of capacity.
Another issue is how often does the quota reset? Daily? Hourly? Monthly? That’ll determine how big those spikes are when the quota lifts.
If this happens it will happen service by service as it's most definitely not been a design criteria.
I've worked on account leasing systems for temporary accounts and talked to the internal team for AWS event engine. And they don't have much more than the official tools.
Edit: not been..
I don't think they are going to implement it. It's too juicy financially to do so. Furthermore, it's bad PR to say they aren't going to do it. So they will keep stringing us along as long as they can.
Well, that's what the incentives would suggest.
Doesn't Google Cloud have a cap and it's completely worthless? https://dev-blog.tomilkieway.com/72k-1/
If AWS doesn't do it, then GC has no incentive to do it either. I think this should be mandated by law, so all companies will have to introduce caps that actually work. If the customer sets $100, this is the maximum they should pay, regardless if the operator has any delays or other problems. It should be their problem. I think once the law mandates it, they'll quickly find a solution.
This finally answers my bafflement over why my requests for a transfer cap feature have been ignored by all thin-second-layer providers of the Vercel etc. type...
AWS should do it at least on bandwidth cost.
Don't give companies that does this money.
Sorry, just a nit pick but I think the grammar for this should be:
* Don't give companies that do this money
Is there any cloud provider that actually implements a hard cap on billing?
Vultr allows you to use a pure pre-pay option. You can even pay with crypto and forgo the credit card. Your account gets shut down when you run out of funds.
Disclaimer: Work for AWS Support. Good and bad things about my employer. Opinions my own.
One of the biggest questions here is what are customers asking for? And the necessary follow-up question: Do customers want to actually bear responsibility for their choices?
Recently, I had a customer lodge a support case because their programmatic access keys were leaked. A malicious actor was then able to use those credentials to exfiltrate their S3 data, and delete it. Now the S3 data is being ransomed.
The customer opened a case asking if there was any way to get the data back. If we had to go the 'extra mile', the customer demanded we do that.
The answer is simply: No. We can't get that data back.
Customers demand that they own the data they upload into S3. They don't want AWS to be able to read the data, nor do they want us to store the data internally as a backup. That's what customers demand, and what AWS gives them.
Now something regrettable happened (a customer got pwned) and now a customer wants AWS to bear the responsibility for backing up the data. I bet a week ago they would've demanded that they have absolute sovereignty over their data. Shit changes when shit hits the fan.
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Hard caps are doable, but the question is: Do customers want responsibility for this feature?
I read a comment wherein someone's startup was killed due to $30k of bandwidth costs because of misconfigurations that led to users abusing their platform. That sucks. It's not in AWS's interest to put their customers out of business.
But let's look at the flip side. What if someone in the finance department puts a hard cap on an account. But then a tweet goes viral, and business is pouring in. Everyone, in their rush to keep everything scaling appropriately, forgets there's a hard cap. They hit the business and now there's a hard outage in the middle of the biggest business event they've ever had.
Who's the customer going to hold responsible for the outage? As someone who deals with customer misconfigurations on AWS for a living, I assure you the customer won't be calling themselves demanding an explanation.
What happens if the person in charge of budgets doesn't lift the cap before the Christmas holidays? Again, hard down. Again, customer won't be mad at themselves.
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It's better to let AWS run as the customer configures it to run than bring everything to an abrupt stop. Billing alerts exist, and you can use Lambda to turn off resources that are above their billing threshold.
But doing a hard cap on an account? Something a subsection of customers might want, but something not many customers will want to take responsibility for when something goes sideways.
They're on the decline and are now in the "extract every last cent" phase of the organization.
I don't see how this conclusion could follow from a bill limit feature not ever being implemented. That would only make sense if this was about them removing such a feature.
I feel like Amazon's teams have actually the opposite mindset of this if you actually use their product/services. No affiliation to amazon whatsoever saying this.
What makes you say that they are in decline?
So you think they were already declining ten years ago, and still are? Amazon's market cap has gone up by a factor of 20 in that time.
I'm told some really fancy restaurants would not show the prices on the rational that "if you need to know the price, then it's too expensive for you"
Well, I think the same point can be made here: if you need a price cap, then AWS is too expensive for you ;)
I use a few free APIs with usage limits. Maybe I pay 10 cents a year. I’m always afraid to one time open an invoice to find out it’s way more than that for whatever reason.
The problem is that AWS markets itself as “pay what you use” and generally that’s extremely little for me, but if I screw up with Glacier I suppose I could get a $100 bill because I restored some backups the wrong way.
> but if I screw up with Glacier I suppose I could get a $100 bill because I restored some backups the wrong way.
You wouldn't be the first person to do that: https://medium.com/@karppinen/how-i-ended-up-paying-150-for-...
Well that's just rubbish.
The whole idea of services like AWS is that it is scalable as a solution for startups, small businesses and large global corporations. Not just large corporations that would be considered customers of a "fancy" web services provider.
Sorry about that, I thought the ;) would have made it clear that this is a joke.
Cheeky! now it all makes sense, sorry pal I misread your post in that case