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Comment by lima | Hacker News Reader

It's true, neither AWS nor GCP support spending limits. Only alerting.

It is worth noting that both products have had "student" tiers or similar, that had fixed credit limits with a cliff.

Therefore, they've implemented hard-limits. So not offering hard-limits is a business decision, NOT a technical one. They're essentially hiding functionality they have.

Make of that as you will. Anyone justifying it, should be me with skepticism.

I have never heard of nor seen AWS student accounts.

There is a free tier but that varies per service and anyway will not limit anything. It works as if it just gives you some credit to offset the costs.

AWS Educate "Starter" Accounts were exactly that[0]. It didn't ask for, nor need a Credit Card, and there was functionally no way to exceed.

[0] https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/cloud-computing/aws-educate-st...

They also offered (may still offer) the same thing with AWS Academy.

Soft limits would be ideal (x/day with maximum peak of x/minute), but hey, that's literally negative value to them (work to code, CPU time to implement, less income out of "mistakes")

That's because you pay for stuff like storage. If you had a spending limit, they'd have to delete your data to stop your spend.

If only there was a way to pause all the other stuff and only let storage to keep costing you ...

There is, and it would cause an outage while still not achieving the supposed goal of not going over budget. You don't want to be killing your customer's production over potential misconfigurations/forgotten budgets. Especially when you'd continue to bill them for the storage and other static things like IPs.

It's so much easier for them to have support wave accidental overuses.

If only we had the technology to exempt storage from spending limits.

As if that would solve anything? Depending on use, storage could be the largest line item (storage across databases, VMs, object storage).

I've heard that Google keeps Google Drive data around for up to two years if your subscription expired and your account is over quota. They could certainly do the same with other cloud storage.

If I reduce my gdrive subscription they don’t simply delete what I have over the new (lower) limit. There is a grace period and it’s standard practice. Why should it be any different in this case?

Or do what every other industry does, and trigger a conversation. Or even don't let you store more, or restrict access. Why the need to delete?

'By the way old chap, you have gone over your storage limit. Do you want to buy more or delete some stuff?'

>By the way old chap, you have gone over your storage limit. Do you want to buy more or delete some stuff?

Why does my AWS counselor sound British. Am I in eu-west-2?

Why shouldn't it, its just a machine? Wouldn't the world be better if these messages varied a bit!

That's what alarms that you set up are for.

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