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461 points thunderbong | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.721s | source
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modernerd ◴[] No.42134059[source]
"Billing alerts" are a joke, give us hard spend limits. Then offer a way to set those limits during onboarding.

Building a business on blank cheques and accidental spends is shady. It's also a large barrier to adoption. The more times devs see reports like, "I tried [random 20-minute tutorial] and woke up to a bill for my life's savings and luckily support waived the fee this one time but next time they're coming for my house", the less they'll want to explore your offerings.

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spacebanana7 ◴[] No.42134695[source]
Hard spend limits are an anti-feature for enterprise customers, who are the core customer of AWS. Almost no level of accidental spend is worth creating downtime or data loss in a critical application.

Even having the option of a hard spend limit would be hazardous, because accounting teams might push the use of such tools, and thereby risk data loss incidents when problems happen.

Hard spend limits might make sense for indie / SME focused cloud vendors though.

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another-dave ◴[] No.42134971[source]
> Almost no level of accidental spend is worth creating downtime or data loss in a critical application.

That feels like a bit of a red herring — if that was their ethos, then you'd _have_ to choose burstable/autoscaling config on every service. If I can configure a service to fall over rather than scale at a hard limit, that points to them understanding different their use cases (prod vs dev) and customer types (start-up vs enterprise).

Additionally, anytime I've worked for an enterprise customer, they've had a master service agreement set-up with AWS professional services rather than entering credit card info, so they could use that as a simple way to offer choices.

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1. Terretta ◴[] No.42136027[source]
A service doesn't just "fall over" at a limit. There has to be other machinery to limit it.

Given that all your usage and traffic other than that at the limit request should not be gated or limited, why would you want someone else injecting additional complexity and bottleneck risk inline?

Determine your own graceful envelope, implement accordingly.

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2. another-dave ◴[] No.42136075[source]
The OP was saying that having any spending limit would be antithetical to enterprise usage because it could bring critical services to a halt.

My point was, if that's a reason to have unbounded spending, why allow me to spin up a service that can get CPU or RAM bound?

> Determine your own graceful envelope, implement accordingly.

Which most people do have, but we then also want an "ungraceful" backstop — trains have both a brake and a dead man's switch.