upvote
Can you not set spending limits in AWS?
reply
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.
reply
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.

reply
Big cloud didn't want to rewrite its billing systems from scratch to please its smallest customers.
reply
With AI it should take like a weekend.
reply
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

reply
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.

reply
Storage-based billing stories. When an account is hijacked it's always for compute, not storage.
reply
Oh, I also don’t think I’ve ever seen that but I’m not surprised. Even if you could steal a huge amount of storage, filling it with data would take ages and the cat and mouse game of moving the data as hacks get uncovered would be untenable.

I have seen things get hacked for bandwidth, back in the days before you could rent a gbps uplink from the cloud for $0.12. Some scene release groups would hack into universities or companies to do the initial seeding over their super fast links. It used storage, but that wasn’t really the goal.

reply
They could do it; they don't want to.
reply
What is a storage-based billing story?
reply
Once upon a time in a cloud kingdom far, far away a big, beautiful bill was issued based on storage causing much disconcertion. Etc.
reply
> 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.

reply
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.
reply
No wiggle room to come up with a workable solution. Let’s go shopping instead.
reply
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.

reply
No, alerts but not limits.
reply
Not only can you not set limits, even the alarms are not real time. So it is entirely possible to get on the hook for terrifying amounts of money and not know until it's all too late.
reply
he did, 140 billion :D
reply
If you owe AWS 140B dollars its their problem ;)
reply