How does that work for stateful services like S3? Should they just delete the data? (Which for some people may in fact be what they'd want.)
I do realize you can get closer to a hard limit while possibly exempting some services that would let you get over the limit--I suppose. Though then people would doubtless complain that the hard and fast limit is not, in fact, a hard and fast limit.
But if the data is stored, the clock keeps ticking until you delete it. If I have a TB of data stored, and I hit my $1K (or whatever limit) on April 15, the only way that I don't get hit with a >$1K bill for the month is if AWS deletes anything I have stored on the service. (Or at least holds it hostage until I pay up for the overage.)
You can easily calculate what the bill will be at the end of the month if no new data is stored or deleted between now and then. So if you need a hard cutoff for storage, use that.
There's enough room there for workflows where I know I'm going to delete data later that allowing configuration would be valuable. (Maybe I can set a timed expiration at the moment of storage, instead of having to store first and separately delete later? That would keep end-of-month predictions accurate.) But it isn't difficult to set the hard cutoff.
>> My pet project cannot involve the risk of possibly costing me thousands or more because I made a mistake or it got super popular over night. I'd rather my site just 503.
> How does that work for stateful services like S3? Should they just delete the data?
No, for services like these it should cap at the cost of keeping the data indefinitely. If your budget limit for S3 was $1000 per month, and you tried to add an object which if not deleted would make you use $1010 next month (and every month after that), it should reject adding that object.
We've got processes that push massive files into S3 for a later to stage to then stream out, and delete when they've completed successfully.
So now we've created a situation where everything's running fine, our bill is consistently $500/mo, I go casually turn on a $1k/mo spending limit... aaaaand suddenly everything starts failing in totally non-obvious ways.
I do realize you can get closer to a hard limit while possibly exempting some services that would let you get over the limit--I suppose. Though then people would doubtless complain that the hard and fast limit is not, in fact, a hard and fast limit.