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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

>I would rather my whole system shut down and be unusable while I investigate vs. auto-scale and charge me a bill I can't cover.

The counterargument is that you get a usage spike (which is often a good thing for a company), and AWS shuts down everything connected to your AWS account without warning.

I'm not necessarily sure that optional/non-default hard circuit breakers would be a bad thing. But it certainly appears not to be a heavily demanded customer feature and, honestly, if it's not the default--which is shouldn't be--I wonder how many customers, or at least customers the cloud providers really care about, would use them.

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The usage spike is very very rarely worth the cost. That’s a pipe dream the cloud providers sell to cover up the fact that these scenarios are sweet sweet profit for them and nothing more. There are very few businesses where making more money is just a matter of throwing some more compute at it.

Nearly every customer (i.e. all of them with a budget) would make use of circuit breakers and it would make Amazon absolutely $0 while costing them untold amounts. Are you really surprised Amazon hasn’t implemented them?

If enough people demand them it could become a competitive advantage in the already-cutthroat cloud hosting market

I imagine if usage spikes are not valuable and uncommon then static resources could be less expensive to provision, right?

For example Vultr can give you a "bare metal" 8vcpu-32GB box for $120 a month (Not sure if this is contract or on-demand) vs amazons M5.2xlarge for $205 reserved. $80 might not sound like much, but that's 70% more. Who would love to save ~42% on their cloud costs?

How much more does it costs AWS to allow you to spin up resources and then liberally offer refunds when you contact them and tell them you made a mistake?

Not much. Some electricity. Servers are there either way.

Exactly. They decided it was cheaper for them to let you make mistakes and then grant refunds.

> Are you really surprised Amazon hasn’t implemented them?

It become harmful to them though. At a certain point people feel the hit and avoid the service. Having people spent a little more accidentally and go ‘oh well, oops’ is the sweet spot. An unexpected $80k which kills the company is bad for everyone.

Not really. Everyone thinks it’s can’t happen to them. Certainly me too, and I’ve been using aws since it first launched in some capacity or the other.

This almost feels like banking fees. A dollar here, a dollar there. In this case it’s a couple of thousand here and there until you can’t afford it anymore lol.

You'd factor that in to the ceiling you set. Maybe your ceiling is 2x or 3x your expected usage. That could still be low enough not to bankrupt your company.

Most cellphone providers provide you with a text message when you're over 90% of your hard cap, and you can login and buy more bandwidth if you really need it.

The same could be done with cloud doo-dads.

You can absolutely set this up in AWS and GCP.

Amazon isn't going to put much effort into automating reminders for you to keep your bill low.

Actually, Budgets allow you to feed an SNS that will dispatch reminders at any point (10%, 50%, 100%) of a total spend amount.

Sadly, some services take as long as 24 hours to report billing.

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