Comment by inigyou
6 days ago
No you can't. Spending limits imply realtime billing backend flows and they also imply deleting all your data so that you don't pay for storage.
6 days ago
No you can't. Spending limits imply realtime billing backend flows and they also imply deleting all your data so that you don't pay for storage.
I heard this false justification already in 2007, in spite of many customers asking for it.
Incidentaly, smaller competitors solved this issue decades ago, while the big cloud decided it is more convenient never to implement it.
Big cloud didn't want to rewrite its billing systems from scratch to please its smallest customers.
With AI it should take like a weekend.
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Realtime billing seems entirely within the abilities of AWS.
"Limits except for Storage" seems even easier - I don't think I've ever heard of a storage-based billing story, although I'm sure one or two exist
Storage-based billing is huge, unless you mean something other than “places that make you pay for storage separately”.
Also many places I’ve worked, storage is a huge part of the spend but that depends a lot on what you do. e-commerce doesn’t use a ton of it, but if you handle user-generated content or do any kind of training (LLM, computer vision, etc) then you can very much end up in a place where storage becomes a top line number for infra spend.
GitHub pre-Copilot was probably like that. They host a shitload of data, most of which is just at rest the majority of the time. Storage and networking are probably the majority of their infra costs.
Storage-based billing stories. When an account is hijacked it's always for compute, not storage.
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They could do it; they don't want to.
What is a storage-based billing story?
Once upon a time in a cloud kingdom far, far away a big, beautiful bill was issued based on storage causing much disconcertion. Etc.
Like kgwgk already said - people post the occasional horror story where they run up a huge AWS bill, either due to a run-away process or getting hacked. It seems to almost always be about Compute, not Storage.
> and they also imply deleting all your data so that you don't pay for storage.
Not necessarily. They could imply that your storage becomes inaccessible immediately, but only gets deleted after some time period (say, 1 month). What spending limits do depends on the implementation.
That's even more work to implement. And now you store files on a second account that pays for only one day a month to not get deleted.
How would that work? If you only pay for one day, your access (read and write) gets cut off after the first month. Then if you don't pay the bill for the entire grace period, your data gets deleted.
No wiggle room to come up with a workable solution. Let’s go shopping instead.
Storage could switch to read only.
That would mean an outage but that is still better than going bankrupt and teach you a thing or two about monitoring.