alt Hacker NewsI think I read somewhere that calculating and limiting cloud usage costs is a really hard problem. But I feel that if Google were motivated to do it, they can do it. It's hard, not impossible. They just don't care to solve this particular problem.
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In the article it states that this person had an account that would have been limited to $2000 in usage.
And the system automatically upgraded them to higher spending limits when they crossed the $1000 in usage costs.
They could definitely make that an opt-in feature.
It's the same fundamental problem as view counters, something Google is famously good at solving. Eventually consistent solutions are well-understood, and wouldn't have these kinds of massive cost-overruns.
I mean yes, look at Corey Quinn [1] for example. He has built an entire career out of the fact that cloud billing trips people up.
(Generally, tech seems to skate by on creating insanely complicated things, knowing that given enough pain, people will start blogging about their solutions, ie effectively outsourcing the cost and effort of doing something about it.)
It’s hard on AWS as well, but I agree. There’s just no incentive for the billing experience to be better.
If they can COUNT it and charge based on that, that means they can count it and react.
If I, not having their budget or engineers, can have pretty much instant Prometheus event reacting to metrics, surely it wouldn't be too hard for them to have triggers like this -- somehow their AI can automatically ban people based on something, can't they do something for the customers?
They can, just don't want to.