Comment by nick238
1 year ago
Frequently I'm looking up if there's a way to have a hard limit on AWS billing, and it seems like many other people have the same concern as well. I do understand that the massively distributed system hosting 100+ products each with ~10 things to bill for means you can't have each service going to the magic billing limiter service and be ask "can account X spend 0.000001 USD now?" * every request * every cloud tenant, etc, etc.
That said, I still think there should be an easy way to set a daily limit. Should I use the Budget service to do that? Cost Explorer? Billing Alarms? Is it possible to have them shed whatever's spending all the money?...
Again, I see the whole can of worms here: what if your service is jamming tons of data into S3 because of a bug? Or you actually started something that got popular and you have a gigantic Dynamo table? Stopping an EC2 instance is maybe an easy call, but deleting data is iffy.
AWS just feels like a minefield because I'm occasionally worried with all the products, I'll check a box when creating an instance or SG or whatever, and that'll (e.g.) trigger CloudWatch to read all my logs, but I have some crappy debug config for some app which will vomit out dozens of logs a second accidentally, and instead of just trashing `/var/log/` I get billed for millions of log events or something.
AWS doesn't have to check that for every request. They only have to eat the cost if you go over and use more before they shut you down. And the shut down should be in a way that they switch data to read only and give you a day to react before they delete.
They might even offer this as an insurance, so you pay a little more but can be sure you stay in budget.