AWS now supports spend limits | Hacker News Reader

AWS now supports spend limits

docs.aws.amazon.com

22 pointsxyos5 comments

This seems to be more focused around predicting when a budget will be exhausted and taking gradual steps to reduce costs as the budget runs out, rather than a global hard cap.

I.e it’s unclear how this works with per-request billing - if I set a budget of $20, then immediately spam $40 worth of S3 GET requests, will 50% of those requests be blocked or will I be charged $40?

I doubt they’ve added a globally consistent billing/charge counter to the S3 read path, so either I get charged $40 or AWS eats the additional $20.

Read the doc page, and it's both: a hard stop at the project level, with optional gradual controls in front of it. Nothing per-request.

Only about 15 years later than it should have been introduced

Hi, Fabricio from AWS here. I hear you and it's something we've heard for years and am glad is finally being rolled out. If you have more thoughts on the new experience, feel free to share :D

Thanks! This is very exciting.

It looks like the spend limits can't be applied to existing AWS Accounts but only to new Projects, that there is no migration path from AWS Account -> Project, that you can only have 10 projects with Spend Limits, and that Projects can't use any region other than one of three regions determined by your organizational contact address. Is the plan to get rid of these limitations or should we expect these limitations to stay?

My use case is that our company would like to empower our AI agents to do a lot of stuff autonomously that involves reprogramming and spinning up EC2 instances (which, for reasons of latency, often need to be in particular regions other than our company's home address), and also doing data science on large amounts of existing data in our S3 Glacier. We would like to just let the agents run continuously, including when we are all asleep (and there would be no one around to respond to a budget alert). But we are worried that these AI agents might make a mistake that very quickly spends too much money (e.g. spinning up orders of magnitude more instances than they should). Since the agents are autonomous, they might spend money in a way we haven't thought of, so fine-grained budget-based automation wouldn't always work, and account-level spend controls are needed.

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