I doubt there is a fundamental limit which says the reporting needs to be that slow. I suspect that some metrics are slower to query than others, but it would go a long way if you could get near instantaneous billing wherever possible. Even better if you could have a hard shut off if cpu/disk/network spend goes over x limit.
I choose to believe: it is easy money if people cannot easily avoid accidental mega bills.
See my other reply. The reason I believe it’s architected this way is to have a good tradeoff between timeliness and overhead cost. Full correctness at global scale would involve serializing all billable events through a series of global transactions, which would bring performance to a crawl (e.g., 10ms just to synchronize the metric).
This is absolutely right, and I among others have asked AWS to especially please not put any checks on performance "inline" just to do capacity limits. We are happy with the present tradeoffs.
The needs of those wanting to compute should absolutely outweigh the needs of those wanting to not compute.
