> I'm inquiring as to what logically is supposed to happen in the scenarios that occur based on your proposed "pretty simple" solution.
Here's the simplest solution: If the limit is reached, stop serving requests, stop accepting new data, but don't delete any data. Allow static storage costs to go over the limit. That is probably what 99% of people who ask for a budget cap want, and it's the most logical thing to do because typically 99% of the charges are for bandwidth/requests/processing and only 1% for storage. If I set a limit at 10€ and amazon ends up charging me 10.2€ I can live with that.
The next simplest solution would be to look at how much is currently stored, multiply that with the storage cost per hour, multiply that with the remaining hours in the month, then subtract that from the monthly budget, and stop serving requests or accepting new data as soon as this lower limit is reached. This will guarantee that you never go over the limit without having to delete data. If data in storage is deleted before the end of the month, you'll end up spending less than the limit.
Now if you consider this basic math too complicated for a software engineer making $300000 a year, you could do something even simpler: allow the customer to set a limit on each resource. Eg. let the customer say, I want to limit S3 to 100GB of storage and 5TB of bandwidth and 2 million requests (or whatever). Of course that would be a bit of a hassle for the customer, but it would be very effective at preventing surprise charges.
> the majority of people want their stuff to stay up
At any cost? That's unlikely. I'm pretty sure that every company has some limit where they'd prefer the service to be down rather than pay the bill.
But if you go back up the thread you'll see that this discussion is about hobby users and tinkerers, and people who just sign up to try out the tech. These people absolutely want a hard cap on potential charges, and if you don't offer that you might scare them away.
Here's the simplest solution: If the limit is reached, stop serving requests, stop accepting new data, but don't delete any data. Allow static storage costs to go over the limit. That is probably what 99% of people who ask for a budget cap want, and it's the most logical thing to do because typically 99% of the charges are for bandwidth/requests/processing and only 1% for storage. If I set a limit at 10€ and amazon ends up charging me 10.2€ I can live with that.
The next simplest solution would be to look at how much is currently stored, multiply that with the storage cost per hour, multiply that with the remaining hours in the month, then subtract that from the monthly budget, and stop serving requests or accepting new data as soon as this lower limit is reached. This will guarantee that you never go over the limit without having to delete data. If data in storage is deleted before the end of the month, you'll end up spending less than the limit.
Now if you consider this basic math too complicated for a software engineer making $300000 a year, you could do something even simpler: allow the customer to set a limit on each resource. Eg. let the customer say, I want to limit S3 to 100GB of storage and 5TB of bandwidth and 2 million requests (or whatever). Of course that would be a bit of a hassle for the customer, but it would be very effective at preventing surprise charges.
> the majority of people want their stuff to stay up
At any cost? That's unlikely. I'm pretty sure that every company has some limit where they'd prefer the service to be down rather than pay the bill.
But if you go back up the thread you'll see that this discussion is about hobby users and tinkerers, and people who just sign up to try out the tech. These people absolutely want a hard cap on potential charges, and if you don't offer that you might scare them away.