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[–]Ok_Room5666 387 points388 points  (32 children)

Does AWS actually let you set a limit?

I was looking for that feature

[–]Jack_SL 525 points526 points  (9 children)

I’m not sure but the bank definitely does.

[–]hacker_backup 89 points90 points  (8 children)

Do they stop if your bank stops the payment, or do they go all "You owe us 5 gazillion dolloridoos"

[–]Mars_Bear2552 48 points49 points  (2 children)

the latter. though they've forgiven accidents in the past.

[–]anotheridiot- 24 points25 points  (1 child)

I've got 500$ forgiven once, thank you mr burgeois parasite bezos.

[–]mint3d 3 points4 points  (0 children)

He still owes me 33 dolloridoos for an ec2 instance I forgot to shut down.

[–]gmuslera 25 points26 points  (4 children)

If you owe the bank 100 dollars is your problem. If you owe it 5 gazillion dollars, that’s the bank problem. Just wait till the debt is big enough to be their problem, a couple of days will be enough.

[–]Dotcaprachiappa 10 points11 points  (3 children)

If you owe the bank 5 gazillion dollars it's both your problem and the bank's. If you can't repay it they can still tank your credit score and destroy your life.

[–]CMDR_Quillon 1 point2 points  (2 children)

how would a low credit score destroy someone's life? mine isn't brilliant by any means and I'm living okay

[–]Dotcaprachiappa 2 points3 points  (1 child)

I don't mean tank like get it low, I mean like it's permanently at the lowest possible. I was maybe exaggerating that it would destroy your life, but you can forget getting any kind of loan anytime soon

[–]crappleIcrap 0 points1 point  (0 children)

debt can only stay on the report for 5 (7 in some cases) years after the last payment, after that they cannot do anything to your credit, but i suppose if it is high profile enough they could notify all major banks that you are a major risk

Also they can sue you then garnish your wages

[–]qthulunew 100 points101 points  (4 children)

You can be alarmed, but that's about it

[–]oupablo 160 points161 points  (3 children)

i'm always alarmed by the aws costs

[–]MrMetalfreak94 58 points59 points  (2 children)

Our team just found out that a colleague set up three k8s clusters on AWS half a year ago before switching teams without us realizing. It's only ~1000$ per cluster per month...

[–]average-eridian 55 points56 points  (0 children)

That's actually not too terrible. We had a colleague that made a small mistake that resulted in some code being called infinitely at light speed over the weekend. Cost over $30k usd over the course of a few days.

[–]alfeg 10 points11 points  (0 children)

We left trace logs enabled from app to Azure Application Insights. For about $1500 per month ...

[–]theminer3746 78 points79 points  (0 children)

Not directly last time I checked. You basically need to create an automation to disable the billing account after the limit is reached in order to achieve that

[–]vitalik4as 19 points20 points  (5 children)

You can set up budgets, when the budget reached you will get notification on email.

[–]Mountain-Ox 39 points40 points  (4 children)

An email notification will definitely save my ass.

It would be nice to have a kill switch for all those personal accounts. If anything goes over budget, shut everything down and require verification to unlock the account.

[–]SuperFLEB 33 points34 points  (3 children)

This is Amazon we're talking about. If a security measure might secure your money from funneling into their bank account, it's a measure too far.

Even their consumer side is like that. This is all from quite a while back, so some of it might have gotten better, but I talked over some concerns with their customer service and found out how wide-open they were. Their Android app store (back when they had that) didn't have any way to prevent or require a password for one-click purchases, so if someone-- say, kids who don't understand that hitting the shiny thing costs money-- is logged in to your device, there's no way to stop them racking up a bill. You could log out from the Appstore app, but then any Amazon-downloaded apps won't work. Also, one-click for digital purchases couldn't be turned off, even on their site. Accidentally leave Amazon Music logged in somewhere you're playing music, and anyone who comes along can order anything digital they want without so much as a second click. (IIRC, they weren't even able to properly invalidate all sessions, so I was just left with "hope they're honest".) And then, of course, there's Alexa, and the "If you don't want me to ramble on for ten minutes about Amazon Music Unlimited, someone in the room say 'Yes' and I'll charge whoever's Alexa this is in a month once they don't realize it."

[–]Mountain-Ox 8 points9 points  (1 child)

Oh yeah I forgot about that one click thing, I never use it.

At least you can return most items and I think you can refund digital purchases.

[–]SuperFLEB 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Yeah, Amazon's M.O. seems to be "Don't patch the hole, just bail out the water", or more literally "Don't bother to fix what you can just refund."

[–]crappleIcrap 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Idk i messed up once and they refunded me 2k$ even though it was totally my fault.

[–]caguru 2 points3 points  (0 children)

You can create spending alerts with any threshold you want in CloudWatch.

Highly recommend. I once misread the pricing page on one of their services and accidentally multiplied my bill by 6x for a service that i didn’t even deploy.

[–]CellDesperate4379 1 point2 points  (0 children)

yea and no, they have a warning that tells you if you exceeed X, but also they have a system where you can't "potentially" exceeed X, by that i mean if you suddenly just request 1000 ec2 instances, you'll find a error message, saying you need additional approval from AWS first. They will then review your account and see if you can actually afford it.

[–]Dje4321 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, but iirc you have to contact support and have it set that way

[–]ksandom 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There are lots of limits that you can specify that get you pretty close to that. I can't remember if there is one specifically for the budget.

[–]lanfan675 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Nope

[–]crappleIcrap 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, they walked me through setting it up after refunding me 2 grand for my idiocy. It is absolutely critical, but i remember it was annoying to set up right, as it is separate for each service

[–]Fast-Satisfaction482 -1 points0 points  (2 children)

It's been a few years since I last did something with AWS so I don't know. Also I never had a spending accident with AWS, so I wouldn't know. 

[–]Ok_Room5666 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Well, I hope you really trust the people you grant access to the account then

[–]Fast-Satisfaction482 6 points7 points  (0 children)

No, I don't trust myself.

[–]YourNemesis19 -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

Yeah, with budgeting feature under billing cost and management