You can set billing alerts and write a lambda function to respond and disable resources. Of course they don’t make it easy but if you don’t learn how to use limits what do you expect? This argument amazes me. Cloud services require some degree of responsibility on the users side.

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mystraline 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

This is complete utter hogwash.

Up until recently, you could hit somebody else's S3 endpoint, no auth, and get 403's that would charge them 10s of thousands of dollars. Coudnt even firewall it. And no way to see, or anything. Number go up every 15-30 minutes in cost dashboard.

Real responsibility is 'I have 100$ a month for cloud compute'. Give me a easy way to view it, and shut down if I exceed that. That's real responsibility, that Scamazon, Azure, Google - none of them 'permit'.

They (and well, you) instead say "you can build some shitty clone of the functionality we should have provided, but we would make less money".

Oh, and your lambda job? That too costs money. It should not cost more money to detect and stop stuff on 'too much cost' report.

This should be a default feature of cloud: uncapped costs, or stop services

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mbac32768 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I low key live in fear that if I die, my personal AWS bill will get out of control and consume my entire estate before probate court can award my assets.

	▲	leoedin 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I just don't use AWS for personal projects. I got stung once with a $100 bill. Never again. I just can't accept unlimited liability like that in my personal life.

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imtringued 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't know why every single person here insists on budget based limits. What you want is resource based limits with throttling and a calculator that takes your resource limits to determine the averaged monthly bill and a traffic spike bill.

Then the goal would be to set the resource limits to something you are happy with.

Yes, this is a pain in the ass to set up and AWS will probably never implement this, but it is the correct solution.

	▲	anothernewdude 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Because infinite downside makes the EV of using AWS infinitely negative. The biggest risk of any business using AWS is that AWS bankrupts you.

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HelloImSteven 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Lambda has 1mil free requests per month, so there’s a chance it would be free depending on your usage. But still, it’s not straightforward at all, so I get it.

Perhaps requiring support for bill capping is the right way to go, but honestly I don’t see why providers don’t compete at all here. Customers would flock to any platform with something like “You set a budget and uptime requirements, we’ll figure out what needs to be done”, with some sort of managed auto-adjustment and a guarantee of no overage charges.

Ah well, one can only dream.

	▲	RussianCow 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		> but honestly I don’t see why providers don’t compete at all here Because the types of customers that make them the most money don't care about any of this stuff. They'll happily pay whatever AWS (or other cloud provider) charges them, either because "scale" or because the decision makers don't realize there are better options for them. (And depending on the use case, sometimes there aren't.)

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anothernewdude 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I do my test infrastructure with prepaid credit cards. If billing goes over, I just drop the account and start again.

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scoreandmore 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

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megaloblasto 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Freaking Gen Z. They always want transparent pricing and limitations on corporate greed.

	▲	mystraline 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		What's funny is I'm a Xennial (1976-1983). I've seen the games and grift plenty enough times to call it out immediately. It is tiring, but its the same bullshit, different company.

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geoffmanning 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Maybe it's because "i'm a GenXer", but i am both extremely confused by what viewpoint is being labeled here in a way that is supposed to be clearly explained by such a broad characterization that is statiscally less accurate than an astrological sign and disappointed that even on hacker news we have to filter through such garbage.

Oh, and yes, i believe cloud providers should be required to provide controls for users to easily limit their spend.

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graemep 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I am very far from being Gen Z and I agree that having the options to control costs is essential.

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gray_-_wolf 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Last time I was looking into this, is there not up to an hour of delay for the billing alerts? It did not seem possible to ensure you do not run over your budget.

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esafak 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

So you're okay with turning your site off...

	▲	mystraline 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		This a logical fallacy of false dilemma. I made it clear that you ask the user to choose between 'accept risk of overrun and keep running stuff', 'shut down all stuff on exceeding $ number', or even a 'shut down these services on exceeding number', or other possible ways to limit and control costs. The cloud companies do not want to permit this because they would lose money over surprise billing.
	▲	verbify 3 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Isn't that the definition of metered billing?
	▲	dd36 3 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Cats doing tricks has a limited budget.
	▲	anothernewdude 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		YES!