I wish AWS and other clouds would cater to this crowd (which I'm a part of). I just closed my AWS account to remove this exact risk. I love hacking around and playing with the various services—it satisfies my own curiosity and also helps me at work—but it's not worth putting my financial security at risk to keep these accounts open. More than once I've stress-checked my AWS bill in the middle of the night because I was worried there'd be some hidden bill or somebody hacked in and blew up the network traffic or compute or whatever. It's just not worth the loss of peace of mind.
I wonder if a potential solution is to have two billing modes that get hardlocked at signup (or require a key or something to change): one is the standard model with alerts etc. The other is a personal model that kills all of your stuff when you go over some limit. I would feel much safer if the latter were in place.
This is pretty much what the Azure Visual Studio subscription does for you. It sets up a playground with $150 monthly credit and automatic spending limit of $0. Hard lock here is a credit card being supplied, which is optional. I wish more cloud providers would offer such plans.
This credit is not allowed to be used for production workloads and they can automatically spin down your workload at any time. Also the $150 credit is only for enterprise VS, for pro it’s only $50/mo.
Because they want a hard guaranteed ceiling on charges, not after-the-fact alerting for spikes in chargeable activity.
AWS does not support a 'pre-pay' model, and to my knowledge there's no water-tight way of capping your costs. Yes, you can build an watchdog to nuke all your instances if you go over-budget, but there's still the risk of missing some unexpected source of costs, or misconfiguring your watchdog, or perhaps not getting there in time, etc.
AWS could support pre-pay, but they don't. I think it's a reasonable criticism. There are plenty of horror stories about surprise AWS bills. [0][1]
Reminds me of that time we accidentally left a really large Redshift cluster online, for two weeks, before somebody noticed. It was around $12.5k if my memory serves me right.
Never managed to get the money back. They always seem to focus on building tools around reporting (ie “budgets” being just a report, rather than an actual enforceable budget).
But I still can’t escape the fear of accidentally triggering something that costs a lot. It still happens sometimes, a sudden $1k EFS bill being the latest.
I wonder if a potential solution is to have two billing modes that get hardlocked at signup (or require a key or something to change): one is the standard model with alerts etc. The other is a personal model that kills all of your stuff when you go over some limit. I would feel much safer if the latter were in place.