Thread

We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything

611 points · 302 comments · elffjs

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. simonw · 1791083269 · focus · HN ↗
    Amazon's new feature for this specifically says that it won't delete any of your data for 90 days:
    > If you take no action within 90 days of your project being paused, AWS permanently deletes your project data.
    From <a href="https://docs.aws.amazon.com/accounts/latest/reference/create-spend-limit.html#spend-limit-reached" rel="nofollow">https://docs.aws.amazon.com/accounts/latest/reference/create...
    eddythompson80 · 1791084407 · focus · HN ↗
    Can I store few petabytes, and pay for it for one day every 90 days to reset the timer?
    radicalbyte · 1791088896 · focus · HN ↗
    Given that the cloud providers just put a 0 or two on the cost to determine their prices then yes, you could try.
    They'll ban you after a year because it will be against their TOS.
    But sure, go for it.

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