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. Anon1096 · 1791080413 · focus · HN ↗

      It's one part technical, one part a product decision. The technical part is that billing is not actually instant. As a most basic example, a VM reports its billing units every X period of time it is active. If there is some network blip but it's still running, then that billing data could be delayed.

      The product level decision is that "shut down everything" is something the customers you want to target don't actually want. Are we including deleting RDS data? S3? Glacier storage? If so then the headline will just change from "Hobbyist got charged XXXXXX on AWS" to "Business literally had all their data deleted because a hacker took over their VM and mined bitcoin". The only people who really want this are hobbyists and it's not a market segment that's worth chasing. Easier to do the status quo of forgive afterwards then even open the can of worms of deleting all of a business's data and all their backups just because they had a 100k overrun.

      1. Dylan16807 · 1791087389 · focus · HN ↗

         For S3 a reasonable option is a data limit as the primary limit. If you set it a TB over your real needs you only waste one dollar per day after it locks. And there's no need for any other paused service to charge more than that for idle data.

         You're right that nobody wants deletion. Spending limits do not imply deletion.

         1. judge2020 · 1791087614 · focus · HN ↗

            I think a more sensible default is S3/etc locking access to data for 30 days, maybe even as little as 7 days, while you're able to still list and DELETE said data as you wish, without being able to get or put.

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