Turning off all compute resources (EC2, Lambda, Fargate, etc) seems obvious, but what about systems managing state like S3, EBS, and DynamoDB? Should buckets, volumes, and tables be deleted?
This is a basic problem that every adult needs to know how to solve, like "how can I make sure I don't run out of money to pay for food and shelter when I'm buying toys?" You set aside money to pay for the important things first, and what remains sets your limit for discretionary spending.
The cloud vendors are capable of solving this problem, they just refuse to.
Unlimited spending by customers is precisely what they want.
Can you explain why this can't work as a first step into you figure out the rest?
A simple way is for each created resource or rule that creates resources have a toggle to stop/delete the resource if spending limit is reached. I would use this by not enabling this on backups and enabling them on non-production critical resources.
"Tunable spending limit" has consequences that can create other, equally real, problems.
Best effort: Turn off all compute resources, drop dynamically-adjustable persistent resources to their minimums (e.g. dynamo write and read capacity of 1 on every table), leave EBS volumes and S3 alone. In some cases, a user might find their business effectively offline while still racking up a massive AWS bill.
Hard cutoff: Very close to deleting an AWS account. In addition to compute and dynamically-adjustable resources to minimums, this means deleting S3 buckets, Dynamo tables, EBS volumes and snapshots, and everything else that racks up cost by the hour.
The best effort approach sounds reasonable to me. The hard cutoff solution sounds worse than the problem it purports to solve.
Agreed that AWS is poorly incentivized to fix the problem.
- student, learning how to use AWS: set a maximum spend limit and hard cutoff
- small business, running a website: ddos protection and compute limits, pause compute and alert user if spend goes over, giving them the option to raise the limit and/or resume
Etc etc