I actually had a billing alert set, and I did get an alert, but it looked like this:
"You are receiving this email because your estimated charges are greater than the limit you set for the alarm "awsbilling-AWS-Service-Charges-total" in AWS Account XXXXXXXX.
The alarm limit you set was $ 10.00 USD. Your total estimated charges accrued for this billing period are currently $ 1050.95 USD as of Saturday 18 July, 2015 17:34:36 UTC."
Seems so much easier, and safer, for Amazon to just have a hard "don't charge more than this".
Increasingly, I wish this could be fixed at the banking end -- I'd like to be able to get my bank to enforce that I won't give more than £X to some company (obviously the company should be able to find this fact out, and not give me products worth more than £X).
Why would it matter if you're asleep? It's the cloud, if you're not automating things you're doin' it wrong. I wouldn't do that, but you've already put costs ahead of uptime, so burning it down should be fine, yeah?
Amazon's market is largely not people who are worried about those kinds of overages, and I can't really blame them for not worrying about these kinds of edge cases.
Considered that - you'd still be legally liable for the full amount even if your payment method bombs out.
That said I do use this in a personal capacity - all my finance flows through a "burn" account that I keep cruising at a low-ish fund level. So if the sht hits the fan (fraud, overcharge etc)...so be it...I'll fix it once the smoke clears.
>Do you authorize Amazon to charge an unlimited amount? You do not.
You do. That exactly is the problem & why I started this off-topic angle thread bitching about the lack of limits. You can limit the actual charge on the credit card, but I see nothing capping the legal liability. i.e. They could in theory reposes your home because of an unpaid AWS account. In theory - I'd love to have someone prove me I'm wrong in this thinking. Until someone does though...this seems way too risky for a hobby/toy.
> They could in theory reposes your home because of an unpaid AWS account.
Technically, no. I doubt Amazon would risk the publicity and attempt to garnish your wages or pursue your assets; you could, of course, declare bankruptcy to protect your home from their judgement if they went so far as to obtain one.
Yes you do. That's how their billing works and there are several legal clauses in their terms as well as notices in the console. You are responsible for the resources you use.
It's not on them to check your credit limit and only spend that much while you get access to resources first. They will have a legal claim to get paid and will pursue it, especially if its 5 figures or higher. The collections industry exists just for this purpose.
I don't want alerts, I want a fixed amount limit. If watching this sht was my day job then sure I'd be OK with billing alerts. I'm busy fighting other fires in my day job though & often won't see mails for days. By that time Amazon might have bankrupted me.
Amazon has some decent engineers & this is not technically difficult. Its very obviously a concious decision to not provide this very useful feature as any kind of capping feature will negatively impact revenue...but its also literally the only reason why I don't have a paid AWS account for personal use.
You're in AWS. Why do you think alerts mean you need to be watching for them? Alerts come from CloudWatch, to SNS, and from that can go wherever you want them to. So do that, with the tools they've already given you. And this lets you kill only what you want to kill--I mean, do you want them to dump all your S3 buckets? Or just, say, down all your EC2 nodes?
It's not about capping features being negative for revenue, it's that the customers who want it don't matter; if it's not something a company dropping $20K/month is going to use, I doubt it's really worth the time of day. You are a Linode or DigitalOcean customer, and that's not a bad thing, but I think that AWS is not the right place for you and I think that they know that.
You miss my point - its not a technical problem. As I said this isn't my day job.
Sure a hacker/sysadmin/whatever could re-route the AWS warning to whatever system. For me this would be a hobby/toy though and I can't have a toy that exposes me to a potential multi-thousand bill out of the blue. Thats not a hobby - thats a gamble.
As I said in my initial post - its like leveraged derivatives. If I were a day trader living that reality then that kind of uncertain would be acceptable. I'm not a day trader though so I don't want that kind of blank cheque responsibility on something I'm not actively watching.
Complaining that they don't cater to people who don't make them even couch-cushions money and won't use the tools they have to do exactly what they want is really silly.
Not all services are intended for all types of customer. Right now in their business lifecycle, you're the kind of customer AWS should fire.
I believe his point is that you aren't their target customer. It's like walking into a freight distribution center and asking to buy $0.50 worth of chewing gum. Sure, somebody might accommodate you, but complaining about them not doing so doesn't make a lot of sense.
In Amazon's shoes I'm not sure I'd offer a feature like that at all, because someone might set that to be "smart", forget about it as the business grows, and then have a bunch of servers terminated and/or data destroyed right during an excitingly busy period. It would be an extraordinarily bad customer experience. It could be much better for them to do as now and then occasionally credit people who accidentally go over.
> and/or data destroyed right during an excitingly busy period
The idea that service providers destroy data when a cap is reached is just plain weird. Usually your access to the data is simply blocked - then you can pony up some more $$ if you want access to it.
Similarly, it's also weird that people think Amazon doesn't care about 4- and 5-figure accounts. They do. Big accounts bring in money... but so do a lot of small accounts... and there are a hell of a lot more small accounts than big accounts. At my last job our monthly bill was $1-2k, and I'd get regular contacts from the AWS account manager, along with free training days.
I think that the real reason is that AWS is generally not at capacity, and if someone does have a hostile overage event, it's quite short term, and the only money that AWS really loses is from the wattage used by the VMs. There's no extra labour or hardware on their side. Refunding overages is good PR and not all that expensive, as long as it doesn't prevent other paying customers from accessing existing resources.
> The idea that service providers destroy data when a cap is reached is just plain weird.
This fellow is proposing an account that's capped. In AWS-land with by-the-hour servers, that would presumably mean terminating running servers. Servers that have data in RAM. Servers with volatile local disks that get recycled as soon at they're terminated. Maybe you have an idea of how to shut down all of Amazon's 40-odd services with no risk of data loss, but I'm not seeing one.
If they're not going terminate them, then either they're going to keep charging or not. If they keep charging, then it seems like it's more a billing alert plus a service interruption. If they don't charge, then it's more like what they do now, which is waive charges for mistakes, except with a service interruption.
> Similarly, it's also weird that people think Amazon doesn't care about 4- and 5-figure accounts.
I think they do care about them. I'm just saying they won't go out of their way for the $50/month accounts if it means putting serious customers at risk.
You're mixing and matching your incredulity. On the one hand, AWS has 40 services. On the other hand, everything is terminated like an EC2 instance... Which really isn't the case.
So, to begin with, most of their services can either be powered down (with chickenfeed storage costs that they could cover as part of the deal) or are outright free. Most things that you fork over money for in AWS can be disabled with some form of networking block. Have code in Lambda? Well, it doesn't get destroyed, it just gets blocked. Have RDS databases or Elasticache? Block access, and perhaps power them down after X time (which saves them to s3, and block storage for AWS's internal use is very cheap - retail s3 is 3c/GB/month). S3 itself also gets your access cut. SES and SNS just stop processing their queues. Things like VPCs and IAM are free to begin with. The costs of keeping these things running behind a block is trivial compared to the overage charges they already routinely waive.
And then we come to EC2... and the story still isn't 'must be terminated'. EC2 instances can be powered down and ELB access blocked, leaving the config all in place and the instance's drive saved to s3 (which is where AMIs and volume snapshots/unpowered instances live). Yes, you will lose data in RAM, but you just get the account holder to accept that the machines can be shut down by AWS, just like already happens with spot instances. If the client opts in to capped pricing, then they can take that into account and design their system around the sudden downing of the instances.
I certainly didn't say everything is terminated like EC2, so I don't know where you're getting that from.
And it looks like we agree: any attempt on Amazon's part to create something like this would be complicated and would still not remove the risk of data loss. An service interruption is, of course, a certainty.
So as far as I can see, the feature still doesn't make much sense. It's only really useful to people who aren't doing anything in Amazon that matters.
>I believe his point is that you aren't their target customer.
I hear you & understand your argument. They are offering AWS free tier to me for zero USD though, so I don't think my offer of a paid account capped to 200 USD is unreasonable. It is telling though that they won't give free AWS accounts without CC details...
I'm not trying to screw amazon here...I just want a little bit of VM time that I can use to toy around with from a reputable source without signing over the rights to my first-born.
I think small developers are their target customer, as well as big customers. After all, why would the big customer's care about the free tier? Similarly, why open the 'aws pop-up lofts'? https://aws.amazon.com/start-ups/loft/
If you are a big company thinking of using AWS, you probably pay a thousand bucks to send some of your engineers on a course to learn how to use it, or hire a consultant with those skills, you don't shlep down to the pop-up loft for their free 'ask-an-architect' sessions, free coffee and free candy.
It's self-funded startups and folks doing personal projects that those initiatives are aimed at, IMO, and they are the ones who would benefit from this kind of thing. By comparison, Google cloud (or at least appengine) does have billing limits, the daily ones reset each 24 hours, if you hit your billing limit, your instances just don't run until the limits reset.
To be fair though, the AWS customer service are always very quick to allow refunds, for small or large amounts. When I first started, I thought I had switched everything off, but something was still running and I got a couple of bills of around $20 over two months. When I complained, they refunded it, and were very nice about it. The are lots of cases online where they have refunded over $10,000 in fees to people who left their keys on github.
Maybe they figure the refunds are just the cost of doing business? However, I would prefer not to have to rely on the possibility of their post-hoc generosity when I do something equally stupid in future :)
They don't really care about small customers. However, they do care about the big customers that started as small customers, and about the engineers who use AWS for their hobby and choose it for their big company just because that's what they're familiar with.
FYI, Azure already has monthly spending limits built in and suspends your account once you hit the cap.
When you go over your limit your compute services are all turned off and your data is rendered inaccessible until your account is resumed (which happens at the end of the month or when you raise your spending limit).
(Full Disclosure: I work for the Azure Web Apps team)
>So when you hit the limit you want AWS to stop your spending... how?
How? Very abruptly. I can stop the actual spend my side (credit card side) but I need Amazon to implement a legal mechanism that stops me from being legally liable for a (potentially) unlimited amount. Without that its too risky as a personal project...I'll rather do something safer like BASE jumping.
>You're spending $/hr on compute, so terminate your instances.
If everything goes to plan. hn is full of horror stories about people waking up to bills of people hacking their AWS & mining bitcoins. This would be a toy/hobby/project for me though & I'm painfully aware of my ignorance in this regard. Chances are I will screw up & have a bitcoin mining hacker on my account...hence me needing a hard cap.
Yep, doing budgeting at the end of the month and I found a $20 Amazon charge. Turns out it was from a little bit of data I left on their DB service (which took _a lot_ of clicking to find the one I was actually using) after my free year had expired. Certainly not thousands of dollars, but for just experimenting with the system months ago, it was a rude wakeup call. Ideally I would have been able to say "Never spend more than $0.00, kill any services you have to, I'm _only_ using this for evaluation."
For development/personal stuff, yes, that is exactly what I want. I want to be able to put a hard cap on my downside.
Maybe they can make it a separate account type, maybe the cap can be distinguished by resource type, but for mucking around/side projects/etc it's unsettling to use a resource whose cost is potentially arbitrarily high if something goes wrong.
> I don't want alerts, I want a fixed amount limit.
I don't think you want AWS - I think you just want a VPS or a dedicated server. AWS is for people who are going to need to scale at large - and you pay a premium for that. I've priced it out - as an individual you get more value from a VPS provider such as DigitalOcean than you do from AWS.
>I don't think you want AWS - I think you just want a VPS or a dedicated server.
Fair point - and perhaps the core of the issue. Since the start of this discussion a friendly hn soul has pointed out that Azure does actually allow hard-capping expenses though - a definite win for MS in my eyes.
