The problem isn't that it's too hard. It's that it isn't a business priority. As soon as it becomes prioritised, a legion of very smart AWS engineers will solve it.
Everything has trade-off's. When a responsible person says something is "too hard" it's because they've evaluated the consequences and have deemed them too costly in terms of time, resources, cost, maintenance, or strategy/lost-opportunity. Some things really are "too hard".
I agree it's not too hard technically but am surprised at your contradictory suggestion AWS would deploy "a legion of very smart engineers" to solve it if they decided to implement that ordinary feature. How smart are they?
I suspect the truth here is a bit more ugly. AWS doesn't want to do it because they see the pocket-change taken from accidental mishaps as a net positive. They don't care if it inflicts suffering on students and novices. Sure, they'll fix individual cases if they're shamed publicly or if the individual contacts them in exactly the right way, but at the end of the day, it's more money in their pocket. For every 200 dollar oopsie that gets charged back, how many go silently paid in humiliation and hardship?
What they don’t want is companies that are spending say $2-4 million per month to be able to put in a hard limit at $2.5M.
I would guess most companies spending millions per month on AWS are just guessing what next month’s bill will be, and have been conditioned to not freak out if it’s a million over, as long as that doesn’t happen every month. That conditioning has to start early.
Why not? It would make companies happy.
The reality is that, as much as many would like this feature, I'm not sure that a lot of large customers are actually asking for it. Does anyone who works at a large company know if they've asked for this feature before?
I can imagine why startups might want it, but also, AWS is extremely forgiving with startups and throws tons of money at them, so idk.
what do you think will happen to your EC2 instances if your payment method on file with Amazon fails repeatedly and for more than 30 days? Do you think they will just keep those instances intact indefinitely without payment because they promised not to 'randomly destroy things'?
(Had to resist the urge to post “Occam’s Razor” or some other incorrect thing to bait someone to correct me)
As someone who tries to always get things right, it somehow seems wrong to deliberately post wrong answers.
I know it won't go over well at Stackoverflow, which is one of the very best places to get accurate and helpful information.
Now I'm positive that he was doing the same thing as you describe.
The effect on me was a reduced interaction with that person, I'd much rather have an honest answer or a "I don't have time" answer.
"Too hard" is not an excuse. They have all the resources they need at their disposal to get the job done.
A culture they feel aligned with.
They are poor or high burn rate consumers.
They are curious.
But, it would seem, most of all they have different priorities that you.
I write that as someone who routinely dismisses their recruitment attempts.
Let these people fix climate change then.
Sarcasm aside, it must be boring working in a place where no problem is ever too hard.
that's cheaper than the pandemic. no reason it couldn't have been done already.
i no longer consider climate change a hard problem, the only hard problem is building political momentum without getting shot