If not possible to cap price, starting with the capacity limiter on S3 and bandwidth limit at VPC level would do.
The possibility that someone flood the server even for static resources causing bandwidth spiked Bill is scary.
The possibility that someone flood the server even for static resources causing bandwidth spiked Bill is scary.
Genuinely curious, is this just a side-effect of the cloud craze or did DDoS attacks become so powerful that old-school approaches of appropriately-sized bare-metal infrastructure with finite but unmetered bandwidth are no longer viable?
The way I see it, you can provision enough unmetered bandwidth to cover your typical load + a safety margin at a flat rate per month, and worst case scenario if the attack is big enough you merely get downtime (allowing you to re-evaluate the situation and decide whether to throw more bandwidth at the problem or purchase attack mitigation services) instead of an infinite bill?
My current ISP gives me 1Gbps unmetered. Worst case scenario the connection is saturated but at no point the ISP will come to me and ask for extra money.
The practical problem today is that cloud now has so much mindshare, justified or otherwise, that the ecosystem around private hosting is diminished. Finding good people with the required admin skills, good sources of equipment, even good software to run local versions of automation we take for granted in the cloud, can be harder than it used to be.
I won't be surprised if in a few years some huge tech firm we all thought had faded into obscurity enjoys a new lease of life by offering a set of locally hosted equivalents to popular cloud services that are also easy to administer and scale but come with a lot more predictability because they run on the customer's own infrastructure.
If you go up a few levels you can find more interesting things as well...
Someone wrote an good tutorial on using it here: https://codeseekah.com/2012/03/19/cross-server-deployment-wi...
I get the impression that some enterprise vendors don’t offer pay as you go solutions because it would put their sales staff out of work, and because they wouldn’t be able to use a “how much can you afford?” pricing model.
The limited protections available against this threat from the big cloud providers have to be seen as a warning sign. It's only a matter of time before any small business using these services for hosting can be subject to sudden shakedowns by criminals. "Nice business-critical infrastructure you have there, be a shame if anything were to happen to it." Some of the providers do offer a DoS mitigation service, but the cost for the higher levels can start to look like a shakedown itself.
This likely will just alert you somewhat quickly after something has spiked and been running for a number of hours/day, most likely.