I'm also going to point out, as a former AWS engineer, that
"too hard" isn't in the AWS engineering vocabulary. If an AWS engineer were to dismiss something as "too hard", they'd be on the fast track to a performance-improvement-plan.
The problem isn't that it's too hard. It's that it isn't a business priority. As soon as it becomes prioritised, a legion of very smart AWS engineers will solve it.
As an antidote to the "nothing is too hard" flex...
Everything has trade-off's. When a responsible person says something is "too hard" it's because they've evaluated the consequences and have deemed them too costly in terms of time, resources, cost, maintenance, or strategy/lost-opportunity. Some things really are "too hard".
I agree it's not too hard technically but am surprised at your contradictory suggestion AWS would deploy "a legion of very smart engineers" to solve it if they decided to implement that ordinary feature. How smart are they?
I suspect the truth here is a bit more ugly. AWS doesn't want to do it because they see the pocket-change taken from accidental mishaps as a net positive. They don't care if it inflicts suffering on students and novices. Sure, they'll fix individual cases if they're shamed publicly or if the individual contacts them in exactly the right way, but at the end of the day, it's more money in their pocket. For every 200 dollar oopsie that gets charged back, how many go silently paid in humiliation and hardship?
I would speculate that Amazon doesn’t care about the occasional $200 mistake, and is perfectly happy to refund it should they notice.
What they don’t want is companies that are spending say $2-4 million per month to be able to put in a hard limit at $2.5M.
I would guess most companies spending millions per month on AWS are just guessing what next month’s bill will be, and have been conditioned to not freak out if it’s a million over, as long as that doesn’t happen every month. That conditioning has to start early.
> What they don’t want is companies that are spending say $2-4 million per month to be able to put in a hard limit at $2.5M.
Why not? It would make companies happy.
The reality is that, as much as many would like this feature, I'm not sure that a lot of large customers are actually asking for it. Does anyone who works at a large company know if they've asked for this feature before?
I can imagine why startups might want it, but also, AWS is extremely forgiving with startups and throws tons of money at them, so idk.
The problem is, what to do when your account hits the limit? The subtle point about EC2 is you can’t actually shut down servers and have them come back up later unless you have a specific configuration - which not everybody has, so you can’t simply power off systems and not destroy something. Not insurmountable, but not trivial either. You also can’t say that there’s a limit except for an incompatible subset of products, nor can you ask users to be okay with randomly destroying things - the mere rumor of that destroys user trust in something. (Who’s still shy about using EBS despite the last major incident being back in… 2016? Also that outage was limited to one region.)
> nor can you ask users to be okay with randomly destroying things
what do you think will happen to your EC2 instances if your payment method on file with Amazon fails repeatedly and for more than 30 days? Do you think they will just keep those instances intact indefinitely without payment because they promised not to 'randomly destroy things'?
You are correct, which makes it even more pernicious that Amazon chooses to not fix this ... profits at any cost is not a long term benefit ... the longer AWS fails to fix this more folks will tend to lean toward the competition especially Azure ... I have been a unix/linux server side developer since the beginning and always use a linux laptop so no fan of Microsoft however their Azure platform is lightyears ahead of AWS ... its obvious the AWS console web front end needs a wholescale rewrite from the bottom up ... again as you say its not a priority probably because all big consumers never use the AWS console as they have written their own automation layer atop the AWS SDK
I routinely tell a coworker that <random task> isn't possible so that he does the work for me. Oh I know it's possible, I just don't want to do it. Thanks Corey! You're the best.
This works in help forums too. Post a question, there's a chance you get ignored. Post something wrong, and someone will flame you and answer your question.
I realize it can be fun to be snarky but consider the “business priority” portion you didn’t quote and the difference between “it’s too hard to do” and “doing it would cost X and impact performance of service Y by Z%”.
The problem isn't that it's too hard. It's that it isn't a business priority. As soon as it becomes prioritised, a legion of very smart AWS engineers will solve it.