Thread

1. joshdavham · 1791078994 · focus · HN ↗

   It’s incredible that in 2026, AWS and GCP are only just now introducing this. It’s possibly one of the most obviously needed features for a cloud provider.

   Also, does anyone know why it’s taken this long? I suspect it’s a technical reason. While one could be cynical, I doubt it’s an intentional business/product decision. Hard spending caps are both excellent product differentiators and could possibly save these providers money as they don’t have to forgive their users when they accidentally over-use a service.

   1. twoodfin · 1791079268 · focus · HN ↗

      This is one of those features that customers think they want without having thought it through:

      “Never let me spend more than $X” also means, “Shut down my business-critical app/service/solution at 2 am on a Sunday morning because Joel in IT forgot to plan for the new report runs.”

      The product design work to let customers have the first thing without risk of major pain from the second thing is non-trivial.

      1. cogman10 · 1791080309 · focus · HN ↗

         Counter argument, this is the sort of thing that, especially for a smaller business or individual, can be the difference between a bad night and bankruptcy.

         Sure it sucks that critical services blinked out at 2am. But what sucks even more is finding out the image on my ASG had a vulnerability that allowed someone to install a bunch of bitcoin miners which kept me fully scaled from midnight to 2am.

         Or more likely, that a mistake in terraform 1000xed my spending.

         Most people have predictable spending and could easily say "don't spend more than 10x what I normally spend". Or 1.5x, or 2x, 3x, etc. All depending on how they want to balance a runaway cloud expense.

         1. twoodfin · 1791082263 · focus · HN ↗

            For a large enterprise spending millions on AWS, 1.5X is already a budgetary disaster. Unfortunately, shutting off critical IT infra because it hit 1.4X spend this month is a business disaster.

            There’s no magic wand that produces good outcomes when planning or execution goes awry at scale.

            1. cogman10 · 1791083643 · focus · HN ↗

               > especially for a smaller business or individual, can be the difference between a bad night and bankruptcy.

               Just because this isn't a good solution for everyone, doesn't mean it's not a good solution for a large number of people and businesses.

               A lot of businesses can tolerate outages. In fact, even very big businesses come out mostly unscathed when they have multi-hour outages. (how many is it for github this year?)

               An outage causes a reputational black eye. It does not necessarily translate to lost income.

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