Ask HN: What do you do to prevent runaway billing cloud costs from bugs? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What do you do to prevent runaway billing cloud costs from bugs?

7 pointstikkun8 comments

Had an error on vercel recently that caused unexpected costs and had the same on gcp. (Not saying it's the platform's fault)

What do you use/do to prevent unexpected costs and runaway billing issues? e.g. what kinds of manual scripts, or any purpose-designed tools

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We set up some cost alerts in Azure to email us a warning if we trip certain thresholds. Do the other hyperscalars not offer this kind of feature?

AWS does: alerts, hard spending limits and my favourite feature, anomaly detection (sudden jumps in cost).

> hard spending limits

Wow, that must have been added newly in the past two years. I completely erased and shut down my AWS account, because this was not available; all I could do was set alerts and feebly attempt to terminate the EC2 instance. I am pleased that there is now a way to ensure that cost overruns do not happen. I would certainly consider returning to tinkering with cloud services in light of this.

From what I can tell, gcp has alerts at thresholds, but nothing smarter than that. e.g. I'd prefer anomaly detection, and also the ability to set a billing threshold at which the on-demand services would be disabled

Simple, use services providing a fixed price like DigitalOcean, with services with variable cost like Github Actions, we just set a monthly limit. I avoid services where this isn't possible unless I'm confident that there is no way to get into a huge bill.

Avoid providers that can't (don't, can't, they always can if they want to) provide you with useful limits. Use ones that can.

Makes one long for a Cloud version of available-since-the-1970s granular IBM mainframe job accounting controls, eh?

https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos/2.1.0?topic=parameter-exampl...

Could someone please rundown the pros and cons of using third party cost management software (ex. Ternary)? Are the tools in this space specifically designed for enterprise level cloud cost management?

There seem to be a lot of options out there. Would love a critical overview and recommendations for SaaS in this space.

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