[wilhil]

We are a very large AWS reseller and this drives me bonkers with EVERY Cloud, and I've written about this countless times.

There is almost no way what so ever to limit risk and it's crazy.

Cloud operators state that it is because they don't want to shut down popular services or similar - and to be honest, I get this argument - but, it is just awful in practice.

Nearly every cloud has cost report delays of anything up to a month for some services and it's just a nightmare.

I kind of agree that if you have a service costing £5,000 a month - you shouldn't limit spend to £5,001 - but, you should be able to limit to £7,500 - enough room to burst/grow, but not have risk!

All clouds could learn a thing or two from telecoms and rate limits... e.g. if you have services that when not in use have a fixed monthly limit - e.g. storage - then take that out of monthly limit and then use the excess for variable costs.

e.g. storage costs £500 a month, compute costs £200 a month... if a client sets a budget of £1,000 - then deduct £700, maybe ~£100 extra for idle transactions (if in a cloud/model that charges), then have prepay of £200 for "extras".

I just see "the clouds" do AMAZING new features - all this crazy and cool AI bits, yet they can't get basic costs correct - it's crazy in my mind.