The cloud might run me dry
March 18, 2010 6:43 PM   Subscribe

How can I ensure that my Amazon Web Services bill (specifically EC2 usage) doesn't exceed a certain dollar value? Is there a tool that will kill off my instance(s) at after a given amount of resources have been used?

Googling indicates there is no built in feature to do this.
posted by phrontist to Work & Money (6 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Link the account to a dedicated credit card with a fixed limit.
posted by bonobothegreat at 7:12 PM on March 18, 2010


Response by poster: Would that work? It seems like you accrue debt and it charges you periodically. Couldn't you still run up huge charges before the card was refused, which you'd still be responsible for?
posted by phrontist at 7:24 PM on March 18, 2010


Response by poster: I only plan to run a few instances - two or three at most. So I suppose I'll just have a process sit on one and kill the other (public facing) instances off if things get out of hand? Is there an API for resource consumption monitoring?
posted by phrontist at 7:26 PM on March 18, 2010


Response by poster: Well, I'm concerned that, say, a sudden spike in traffic could bankrupt me.
posted by phrontist at 7:36 PM on March 18, 2010


If you're serving content from EC2 (and not S3/Cloudfront) you could install some kind of bandwidth limiter on your webserver.
posted by bitterpants at 6:52 AM on March 19, 2010


Are you wedded to Amazon's system? nearlyfreespeech.net has a pay up front system that pretty much guarantees you can't be overcharged.
posted by chairface at 11:05 PM on March 19, 2010


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