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Comment by bugbuddy | Hacker News Reader

There is a really easy fix to this problem: setting billing limits. This can be done with almost all cloud providers and it takes almost no time. These incidents just show a lack of professionalism on the part of the person incurring the costs. I personally did on the first day I setup a cloud computing account when I was still doing my BS in college. It is not that hard folks. Set the billing limits.

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The main reason I'd use a personal account for one of the big cloud providers would be to learn stuff. At that point a lack of professionalism is kinda expected, because learning stuff is the whole point.

And my understanding is that almost none of the way of setting limits are actual hard limits, but only alerts and some hacked-together emergency abort scripts. Correct me if I'm wrong, but can you actually limit the cost robustly for services that spend that much money in an hour or so? Doesn't help much if I get an email about it and read it two hours afterwards.

I understand the down votes but I would still say that being aware of the rough estimate costs of each service you are using is an integral part of an engineer’s job. After all, we care a lot about CPU cycles and those are measured in femto dollars.

You can call someone an 'engineer' with the associated responsibilities when they are getting paid for what they are doing like an engineer, in a setting that provides them with the protections of an engineer.

Until that point, they are just an individual who got screwed by disguised billing practices.

That's not sufficient, you also must not make mistakes.

I have very limited cloud experience, but I did make a mistake that lead to a rather slow but constant cost. The amount was small enough to not be relevant in a professional context, but the memorable part was that I could not pinpoint the source easily with the AWS tools and my limited understanding of them. The categories and labels were too broad, and it took a bit until I figured out what went wrong. There are certainly better tools to investigate this, but I didn't know them. In the end it was simply luck that the mistake still fell into an area of insignificant amounts of money, but it could have easily been significantly more if a few parameters had been different for the same mistake

> It is not that hard folks. Set the billing limits.

Excellent idea. Please describe how to create an account on AWS or GCP that is not allowed to spend more than $100/mo. Since it is "a really easy fix" and "takes almost no time" it should be easy to explain, right?

https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/hands-on/control-your... tells you how to set up a budget, with notifications when you're getting close.

That's probably enough for 99% of people, and if you're highly motivated, you could make that trigger an SNS notification that trips a circuit breaker.

No, that's really not good enough. I don't want to need to be "highly motivated" in order to set a limit, I want to say this thing cannot use more than this many dollars each month, no conditions no exceptions no questions. If I make a fun little side project and it hits the front page of HN, I don't want to quibble about whether I cut it off in time or some hacked together little script turns things off correctly, I want it capped.

You can in Azure, easily. New Azure free accounts (which most learners start with) have spending limits enabled by default. https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/cost-management-billing/ma...

So honestly if that's true I might have to try Azure, thanks. However, when the claim was "This can be done with almost all cloud providers" I feel comfortable wanting an answer for the other two of the big three.

There are limitations to what you can get with spending limit accounts, but Azure has (always?) had more options for people looking for hard billing caps than the other two big providers.

While you can footgun yourself with hard limits I tend to think that learners/hobbyists should, in general, be able to access at least many services with an ironclad guarantee that they can't be billed for over a certain monthly amount or a total number.

I'm much more inclined to shrug if a startup screws themselves over with a hard spending limit than if a student screws themselves over because of a lack of one.

> This can be done with almost all cloud providers and it takes almost no time.

well, other than the three market leaders (GCP, AWS and Azure)

True these giants make their own lives easier and don’t implement much billing controls into the infrastructure. It is your money so it is your responsibility to protect it. Use billing alerts, hacks, and research things carefully before jumping with both feet.

> It is your money so it is your responsibility to protect it.

This is victim blaming.

Is victim blaming inherently wrong? What about situations where the victim caused their own victimization?

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