I think the sandbox idea is a great one. They should just do away with the free tier entirely except for sandbox accounts in which everything just gets shut down the second you go over the free allowance. If you want to build something for real then you pay for whatever resources you use, but if you just want to tinker around and learn a few things then you can get a safe sandbox to do it in.
BUT, I think the parent's point is that such a feature would actually be quite complicated. It's not just a matter of saying "I only want to spend $X in this account per month/total" but defining exactly what you want to do in the case where you hit that limit. Shut everything down? My guess is almost nobody would want to do that. So it ends up being some complicated configuration where you have to deeply understand all of the services and their billing models in order to configure it in the first place. What are the odds that the student who accidentally spins up 100 EC2s for a school project is going to configure this tool correctly?
But I do think the sandbox would be great. Either you are a professional in which case it is your responsibility to manage your system and put in appropriate controls to prevent huge unexpected bills or you are a student (in the general sense of someone learning AWS, not necessarily just someone in school) in which case they provide a safe environment for you to experiment.
> BUT, I think the parent's point is that such a feature would actually be quite complicated.
Sure, but so is making a cloud. Putting the onus of defining a feature like this on users, only after hearing their request ("I want to control my spend"), is IMO unfair.
Not complicated as in "too hard for AWS to build" but complicated as in "really hard to use as someone trying to limit your spend on AWS." So the people most at risk of huge unexpected bills are also not going to be the people knowledgable enough to setup the billing cap correctly. So it would mostly be a feature for enterprises and most enterprises would rather just pay the extra $ rather than potentially turn off a critical system or accidentally delete some user data.
I worked at a company that spent ~$10m per month on AWS. We had a whole "cloud governance" team who built tools to identify both over and underutilized resources. But they STILL never cut any thing off automatically. The risk/reward ratio just wasn't there. You make the right call and shave $10k off a $10m bill every month, but the one time you take down a mission critical service, you give all of that back and then some.
I've been there. I shut down a bunch of what looked like idle instances doing nothing to reduce spend. 80% of which were, in fact, doing nothing. I did drop off two vms that were supporting critical infrastructure.
Everyone who had done any work on them was long gone. I had done my due diligence to identify what they could possibly be.
Still, the day of reckoning came, and we got calls of services down a week after I turned them off. I spun them back up, and they were going again without any real impact to the business.
This turned out to be a blessing as the very next week the cert these same services depended on expired and if I hadn't learned about the system by turning them off we never would have known which boxes held up those services.
Also a lesson in what happens when people leave without any documentation on where the work they did lives and how it works.
> So the people most at risk of huge unexpected bills are also not going to be the people knowledgable enough to setup the billing cap correctly
Yes, which is why AWS builds it.
> . So it would mostly be a feature for enterprises and most enterprises would rather just pay the extra $ rather than potentially turn off a critical system or accidentally delete some user data.
BUT, I think the parent's point is that such a feature would actually be quite complicated. It's not just a matter of saying "I only want to spend $X in this account per month/total" but defining exactly what you want to do in the case where you hit that limit. Shut everything down? My guess is almost nobody would want to do that. So it ends up being some complicated configuration where you have to deeply understand all of the services and their billing models in order to configure it in the first place. What are the odds that the student who accidentally spins up 100 EC2s for a school project is going to configure this tool correctly?
But I do think the sandbox would be great. Either you are a professional in which case it is your responsibility to manage your system and put in appropriate controls to prevent huge unexpected bills or you are a student (in the general sense of someone learning AWS, not necessarily just someone in school) in which case they provide a safe environment for you to experiment.