8 ms·

Azure has, built in, hard price/cost limits but doesn't allow the public to use them. For example if you have MSDN subscription credit you get a hard limit of u

Azure has, built in, hard price/cost limits but doesn't allow the public to use them. For example if you have MSDN subscription credit you get a hard limit of up to $150/month, but you yourself cannot pick a bespoke limit to use the service more safely. Kind of makes me annoyed. I'm sure enterprises don't care/want unlimited. But solo practitioners, and people new to the platform would love a default e.g. $5K/month limit (or less). Feels like these services just want people to "gotcha" into spending a bunch of money without simple safety nets. PS - No, alerts do not accomplish the same thing, by the time you get the alert you could have spent tens of thousands.

wrkronmiller 7y ago
This is only anecdotal, not personal experience, but I've read online and have had friends "oops" away large sums of money on AWS, and for the most part they seem to have at least gotten a partial discount when they contacted customer support. I strongly suspect opaque pricing and high/nonexistent limits are more about getting large organizations to transition to the cloud seamlessly (i.e. not completely caring/realizing what they're getting into for any particular migration/deployment). Tricking personal users into spending thousands by accident probably doesn't net much money compared to enterprise spend and runs the risk of alienating people who then can go into work and recommend against using a particular platform, having been burned by it on their personal accounts.
- danmur 7y ago
  Or just not being organised enough to calculate process realistically, that's got to be pretty difficult to do
- dkdk8283 7y ago
  A current coworker used to work at AWS and shared an anecdote. Makes sense but I’m surprised I haven’t seen it repeated: nobody wants to work on the billing code because it’s a mess and the penalty for a mistake is very high.
- stingraycharles 7y ago
  > “oops" away large sums of money on AWS, and for the most part they seem to have at least gotten a partial discount when they contacted customer support As a counter-datapoint, we accidentally left a Redshift cluster up idling for two weeks before we started getting alerts, and after numerous attempts have failed to get compensated in any way. The reasoning was that, well, it was what we requested and they had to allocate compute power to it (which we didn’t use). All in all a very frustrating experience and it makes me fairly cynical of all these “I got my money back without problems!” comments. (For what it’s worth, it was about $4k of costs which was a lot for us at the time)
  - thanksforfish 7y ago
    It's also unnecessary. Give users cost controls, then you won't need the current mess of hoping support will write off $$$ of mistakes. With a risk of bankrupting a small shop if support doesn't help it drives risk averse users towards less dynamic offerings. Isn't AWS supposed to focus on the virtuous cycle of saving customers money (or at least reducing AWS supports need to write off customer mistakes)?
    - stingraycharles 7y ago
      I always have the feeling of a bit of “randomness” with these kinds of compensations. It makes sense, as it’s difficult to “codify” these types of things, lest they get abused and you might as well just lower your prices at that point. AWS is a large organization; I believe this type of stuff highly depends upon your “entrance” into the organization, i.e. the account manager. We were probably just unlucky with our Redshift troubles, but it did eventually trigger a move to Google Cloud / Bigquery, as the pay-as-you-go method seemed a bit safer (although it’s still too difficult imho to accurately estimate the costs of queries).
  - mepiethree 7y ago
    similar story here, but with $80k, which almost killed the company. woot.
- rozularen 7y ago
  I, for one, had one of those "oops" when I misused some cloud services, making a VPS instance accessible from the network. When I got charged an extremely large amount I was contacted by the customer support. They explained to me what happened (I had leaked a SECRET in my repo) and then got refunded the total amount. It was quite an anecdotical experience because I wasn't expecting any of it as it was my mistake.
  - JackFr 7y ago
    I inadvertently committed SES creds to GitHub. The only way I found out by an email from AWS telling me that the creds were suspended 24 hours later for a high reported spam rate. Someone had sent 70,000 emails (which is the default daily limit at my tier). Luckily only cost ~$8.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    How do people keep doing this? It’s stated over and over again in all AWS documentation never to put access codes in code or your configuration. Locally, your keys should be stored as part of your user profile (configured with the AWS cli) and when your code is running in AWS, it should get permissions based on an IAM role attached to your EC2/ECS/Lambda.
    - applecrazy 7y ago
      My guess would be poorly configured .gitignore files. I recently had a project collaborator commit his .env file containing credentials to a MongoDB cluster because of this.
      - scarface74 7y ago
        if you follow the guidelines that are repeatedly stressed, your code should never be reading or handling AWS credentials directly. That wouldn’t be an issue. The access keys would be in your usr directory and all of the SDKs would know how to find them. When running on AWS, the SDKs get the credentials from the instance metadata.
- wobbly_bush 7y ago
  This has happened to me when I was a student. I didn't understand EC2 billing cycle well enough and ended up using much more than my student credits. The final bill amount was high as a student (but still less than $1000). Contacted AWS support, they waived the charges but cancelled my account and told I couldn't use that email address anymore for AWS.
Waterluvian 7y ago
It's their loss. I have moved off AWS for this very reason. My pet project cannot involve the risk of possibly costing me thousands or more because I made a mistake or it got super popular over night. I'd rather my site just 503.
- klohto 7y ago
  Billing alerts + Lambda. It's not two clicks, but there is plenty of CF templates.
  - oefrha 7y ago
    Alerts are just alerts. I don’t and can’t monitor alerts 24/7.
    - klohto 7y ago
      That's why you have the Lambda there to scale it down. You don't need to sit there.
      - oefrha 7y ago
        Oh okay, I misunderstood.
    - oceanbreeze83 7y ago
      The alert automatically calls a Lambda function which turns off all your services.
      - amelius 7y ago
        Which puts a burden on the user because this needs to be tested. Also, it's not 100% safe because the user is still accountable.
        scarface74 7y ago
yodsanklai 7y ago
> people new to the platform would love a default e.g. $5K/month limit (or less). I ran into that issue when I wanted to play with AWS EC2 (few years ago, maybe it has changed since then, or maybe I didn't look hard enough). The free VMs were too slow to be usable. Considering my usage, I was unlikely to run into un-expected spendings, but I didn't want to take any risk. Can anyone recommend a similar service with a simpler customer interface where you can set up a simple safety spending limit?
- setr 7y ago
  If you're just looking at VMs you'd probably be better off with something like linode or digital ocean, and get flat monthly fees. Though amongst those service-types, I can't really recommend beyond the fact that linode & DO didn't give me any headaches for the one month I used them
  - Someone1234 7y ago
    > If you're just looking at VMs you'd probably be better off with something like linode or digital ocean, and get flat monthly fees. Which means you won't learn AWS/Azure/etc instead, and they lose mind-share. This is actually an argument for why they SHOULD offer hard limits, not an argument against. If their goal is to push startups/newbies/hobbyists to other platform, they're definitely on the right path. If the goal is to make their cloud services safe to learn/start using, then they could do much better.
    - oefrha 7y ago
      Yeah, for my personal projects I always stick to flat fee hosts like Linode and only ever used AWS for some backup storage in S3, and GCP for a geographical region that Linode doesn’t serve well. And whenever I use the big clouds I get paranoid and have to check billing & usage very often since I’m always just one oops/DDoS away from incurring a large bill, as opposed to the flat fee hosts where I leave shit running for months or years at a time without worrying. (FWIW Amazon Lightsail might be a flat fee service, but I heard performance is pretty bad so never tried it.)
ghaff 7y ago
How does that work for stateful services like S3? Should they just delete the data? (Which for some people may in fact be what they'd want.) I do realize you can get closer to a hard limit while possibly exempting some services that would let you get over the limit--I suppose. Though then people would doubtless complain that the hard and fast limit is not, in fact, a hard and fast limit.
- thaumasiotes 7y ago
  > How does that work for stateful services like S3? Should they just delete the data? Intuitively, if you're capping out your S3 storage, the hard cutoff should look like "don't allow me to store any additional data". If you're capping out retrieval, then "don't serve the data any more".
  - ghaff 7y ago
    Yes for retrieval. Just don't serve it. But if the data is stored, the clock keeps ticking until you delete it. If I have a TB of data stored, and I hit my $1K (or whatever limit) on April 15, the only way that I don't get hit with a >$1K bill for the month is if AWS deletes anything I have stored on the service. (Or at least holds it hostage until I pay up for the overage.)
    - thaumasiotes 7y ago
      You can easily calculate what the bill will be at the end of the month if no new data is stored or deleted between now and then. So if you need a hard cutoff for storage, use that. There's enough room there for workflows where I know I'm going to delete data later that allowing configuration would be valuable. (Maybe I can set a timed expiration at the moment of storage, instead of having to store first and separately delete later? That would keep end-of-month predictions accurate.) But it isn't difficult to set the hard cutoff.
      - unreal37 7y ago
        So then your AWS/Azure service is turned off April 2 because you had some temporary spike in uploads? What you're asking for is not possible and will have unintended consequences. Guaranteed not to meet every customer's expectation of how it works.
dvfjsdhgfv 7y ago
> Feels like these services just want people to "gotcha" into spending a bunch of money without simple safety nets. Because it is just like that. Nine years ago Amazon said (about the same issue raised 14 years ago): "We’ve received similar requests from many of our customers and we definitely understand how important this is to your business; We hear you loud and clear. As it stands right now, we are planning to implement some features that are requested on this thread, though we don’t yet have a timeline to share." [0] In other words, they know people need it, but they prefer not to implement it. [0] https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=58127 https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=58127
Uptrenda 7y ago
Yeah sign me up for being annoying at this. Several times I'm just like: "why the hell can't I just pay for this thing up front and know what I'm spending." Then there's also both Google Cloud, AWS, etc not letting you spin up certain machines because of "quota limits" which you have to apply to raise. It's like: WTF? do they want your money or not? Idk why it's designed like this but it's a horrible experience.
- hackbinary 7y ago
  There is significant regulation for prepay of things in many jurisdictions. Eg gift cards, and it is likely that the cloud businesses do not want to enter that mine field. Yes some of them have gift card programs already, but they probably don't want expanded regulations to contend with large sums of money.
- forty 7y ago
  It's designed to limit the damage when people put their AWS admin credentials on GitHub or in their Android app and someone uses it to mine Bitcoin :)
balakk 7y ago
There are other ways to setup guard-rails in Azure - policies are one such feature: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/governance/policy/tutorials/create-and-manage#implement-a-new-custom-policy https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/governance/policy/tut... They may not necessarily enforce spending limits - but it's possible to restrict provisioning of costly resources, or even whitelist resources that can be provisioned. Almost every Cloud Foundation project nowadays involves setting up these guard-rails.
ridaj 7y ago
Hmm... I'm a big fan of fixed-budget or prepaid services, but between network, storage, VM costs, etc., what should the provider stop serving if you exceed the spend? Create an outage for your whole service? Throttle egress? Start randomly killing VMs?
- clmckinley 7y ago
  I think for their hard limit on MSDN funds, MS shuts down everything that creates incremental costs. As far as i know they don't delete anything, even things like storage that have an associated cost. That said, i am pretty sure the the TOS for MSDN funds say they are not be used for production systems.
jpalomaki 7y ago
Having reliable hard limits for production accounts can be technically difficult as you need to do billing in real-time and also make decisions on what services to kill once the limit is reached. Do you just stop VMs, do you automatically delete data from storage. Many things could result in loss of production data. There can be also many reasons for the budget overrun. It's not always a user error. It could be issue with the platform itself such as error in billing system or faulty autoscale logic. Or it could be caused by an external event, such as denial-of-service attack. (Not sure how things work with the MSDN subscription credit, but at least you are not supposed to be running production workloads with those)
- maest 7y ago
  Just because the decisions are difficult to make doesn't mean there's no need for this feature or ways to implement it.
Twirrim 7y ago
At the risk of bringing up the dreaded name here, these kinds of billing shocks were one of the problems Oracle wanted to solve with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). So it has been built from the ground up with variable limits and quotas in mind. Every service has them from the outset so that customers can control their maximum expenditure. When they started out building OCI, the major clouds weren't offering this as a key feature. Enterprise companies do not want infinite billing. They want fixed and reliable billing, more than anything else. With on-prem equipment they know a few years in advance what their expenditure is going to be at any time, and will have a budgeted amount over the top of that that they're on-board with. Bring the idea of autoscaling with limits, and they're very happy indeed, particularly with the idea of automatically scaling down. > Azure has, built in, hard price/cost limits but doesn't allow the public to use them. For example if you have MSDN subscription credit you get a hard limit of up to $150/month, but you yourself cannot pick a bespoke limit to use the service more safely. I would be willing to bet that that is something enterprise customers can get access too, particularly if their annual expenditure is high enough under normal operation. Microsoft knows the enterprise market very well, just like Oracle does, and like Amazon doesn't (historically speaking, at least).
markus_zhang 7y ago
Once you set up a subscription service and are selling that service to a huge number of people/companies, rarely that you or one of your salesmen don't want the clients to spend a large sum of money on the service unintentionally and then discount partially as a goodwill. Have seen it in sales of all kinds of services. It's just that they have different tricks.
qiller 7y ago
There are also individual limits on number of cores per account, etc - something we ran into when we needed to quickly scale on Black Friday, and the support too forever to get back to us even with priority A ticket.

wrkronmiller 7y ago

This is only anecdotal, not personal experience, but I've read online and have had friends "oops" away large sums of money on AWS, and for the most part they seem to have at least gotten a partial discount when they contacted customer support. I strongly suspect opaque pricing and high/nonexistent limits are more about getting large organizations to transition to the cloud seamlessly (i.e. not completely caring/realizing what they're getting into for any particular migration/deployment). Tricking personal users into spending thousands by accident probably doesn't net much money compared to enterprise spend and runs the risk of alienating people who then can go into work and recommend against using a particular platform, having been burned by it on their personal accounts.

danmur 7y ago
Or just not being organised enough to calculate process realistically, that's got to be pretty difficult to do
dkdk8283 7y ago
A current coworker used to work at AWS and shared an anecdote. Makes sense but I’m surprised I haven’t seen it repeated: nobody wants to work on the billing code because it’s a mess and the penalty for a mistake is very high.
stingraycharles 7y ago
> “oops" away large sums of money on AWS, and for the most part they seem to have at least gotten a partial discount when they contacted customer support As a counter-datapoint, we accidentally left a Redshift cluster up idling for two weeks before we started getting alerts, and after numerous attempts have failed to get compensated in any way. The reasoning was that, well, it was what we requested and they had to allocate compute power to it (which we didn’t use). All in all a very frustrating experience and it makes me fairly cynical of all these “I got my money back without problems!” comments. (For what it’s worth, it was about $4k of costs which was a lot for us at the time)
- thanksforfish 7y ago
  It's also unnecessary. Give users cost controls, then you won't need the current mess of hoping support will write off $$$ of mistakes. With a risk of bankrupting a small shop if support doesn't help it drives risk averse users towards less dynamic offerings. Isn't AWS supposed to focus on the virtuous cycle of saving customers money (or at least reducing AWS supports need to write off customer mistakes)?
  - stingraycharles 7y ago
    I always have the feeling of a bit of “randomness” with these kinds of compensations. It makes sense, as it’s difficult to “codify” these types of things, lest they get abused and you might as well just lower your prices at that point. AWS is a large organization; I believe this type of stuff highly depends upon your “entrance” into the organization, i.e. the account manager. We were probably just unlucky with our Redshift troubles, but it did eventually trigger a move to Google Cloud / Bigquery, as the pay-as-you-go method seemed a bit safer (although it’s still too difficult imho to accurately estimate the costs of queries).
- mepiethree 7y ago
  similar story here, but with $80k, which almost killed the company. woot.
rozularen 7y ago
I, for one, had one of those "oops" when I misused some cloud services, making a VPS instance accessible from the network. When I got charged an extremely large amount I was contacted by the customer support. They explained to me what happened (I had leaked a SECRET in my repo) and then got refunded the total amount. It was quite an anecdotical experience because I wasn't expecting any of it as it was my mistake.
- JackFr 7y ago
  I inadvertently committed SES creds to GitHub. The only way I found out by an email from AWS telling me that the creds were suspended 24 hours later for a high reported spam rate. Someone had sent 70,000 emails (which is the default daily limit at my tier). Luckily only cost ~$8.
- scarface74 7y ago
  How do people keep doing this? It’s stated over and over again in all AWS documentation never to put access codes in code or your configuration. Locally, your keys should be stored as part of your user profile (configured with the AWS cli) and when your code is running in AWS, it should get permissions based on an IAM role attached to your EC2/ECS/Lambda.
  - applecrazy 7y ago
    My guess would be poorly configured .gitignore files. I recently had a project collaborator commit his .env file containing credentials to a MongoDB cluster because of this.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      if you follow the guidelines that are repeatedly stressed, your code should never be reading or handling AWS credentials directly. That wouldn’t be an issue. The access keys would be in your usr directory and all of the SDKs would know how to find them. When running on AWS, the SDKs get the credentials from the instance metadata.
wobbly_bush 7y ago
This has happened to me when I was a student. I didn't understand EC2 billing cycle well enough and ended up using much more than my student credits. The final bill amount was high as a student (but still less than $1000). Contacted AWS support, they waived the charges but cancelled my account and told I couldn't use that email address anymore for AWS.

Waterluvian 7y ago

It's their loss. I have moved off AWS for this very reason. My pet project cannot involve the risk of possibly costing me thousands or more because I made a mistake or it got super popular over night. I'd rather my site just 503.

klohto 7y ago
Billing alerts + Lambda. It's not two clicks, but there is plenty of CF templates.
- oefrha 7y ago
  Alerts are just alerts. I don’t and can’t monitor alerts 24/7.
  - klohto 7y ago
    That's why you have the Lambda there to scale it down. You don't need to sit there.
    - oefrha 7y ago
      Oh okay, I misunderstood.
  - oceanbreeze83 7y ago
    The alert automatically calls a Lambda function which turns off all your services.
    - amelius 7y ago
      Which puts a burden on the user because this needs to be tested. Also, it's not 100% safe because the user is still accountable.
      - scarface74 7y ago

yodsanklai 7y ago

> people new to the platform would love a default e.g. $5K/month limit (or less). I ran into that issue when I wanted to play with AWS EC2 (few years ago, maybe it has changed since then, or maybe I didn't look hard enough). The free VMs were too slow to be usable. Considering my usage, I was unlikely to run into un-expected spendings, but I didn't want to take any risk. Can anyone recommend a similar service with a simpler customer interface where you can set up a simple safety spending limit?

setr 7y ago
If you're just looking at VMs you'd probably be better off with something like linode or digital ocean, and get flat monthly fees. Though amongst those service-types, I can't really recommend beyond the fact that linode & DO didn't give me any headaches for the one month I used them
- Someone1234 7y ago
  > If you're just looking at VMs you'd probably be better off with something like linode or digital ocean, and get flat monthly fees. Which means you won't learn AWS/Azure/etc instead, and they lose mind-share. This is actually an argument for why they SHOULD offer hard limits, not an argument against. If their goal is to push startups/newbies/hobbyists to other platform, they're definitely on the right path. If the goal is to make their cloud services safe to learn/start using, then they could do much better.
  - oefrha 7y ago
    Yeah, for my personal projects I always stick to flat fee hosts like Linode and only ever used AWS for some backup storage in S3, and GCP for a geographical region that Linode doesn’t serve well. And whenever I use the big clouds I get paranoid and have to check billing & usage very often since I’m always just one oops/DDoS away from incurring a large bill, as opposed to the flat fee hosts where I leave shit running for months or years at a time without worrying. (FWIW Amazon Lightsail might be a flat fee service, but I heard performance is pretty bad so never tried it.)

ghaff 7y ago

How does that work for stateful services like S3? Should they just delete the data? (Which for some people may in fact be what they'd want.) I do realize you can get closer to a hard limit while possibly exempting some services that would let you get over the limit--I suppose. Though then people would doubtless complain that the hard and fast limit is not, in fact, a hard and fast limit.

thaumasiotes 7y ago
> How does that work for stateful services like S3? Should they just delete the data? Intuitively, if you're capping out your S3 storage, the hard cutoff should look like "don't allow me to store any additional data". If you're capping out retrieval, then "don't serve the data any more".
- ghaff 7y ago
  Yes for retrieval. Just don't serve it. But if the data is stored, the clock keeps ticking until you delete it. If I have a TB of data stored, and I hit my $1K (or whatever limit) on April 15, the only way that I don't get hit with a >$1K bill for the month is if AWS deletes anything I have stored on the service. (Or at least holds it hostage until I pay up for the overage.)
  - thaumasiotes 7y ago
    You can easily calculate what the bill will be at the end of the month if no new data is stored or deleted between now and then. So if you need a hard cutoff for storage, use that. There's enough room there for workflows where I know I'm going to delete data later that allowing configuration would be valuable. (Maybe I can set a timed expiration at the moment of storage, instead of having to store first and separately delete later? That would keep end-of-month predictions accurate.) But it isn't difficult to set the hard cutoff.
    - unreal37 7y ago
      So then your AWS/Azure service is turned off April 2 because you had some temporary spike in uploads? What you're asking for is not possible and will have unintended consequences. Guaranteed not to meet every customer's expectation of how it works.

dvfjsdhgfv 7y ago

> Feels like these services just want people to "gotcha" into spending a bunch of money without simple safety nets. Because it is just like that. Nine years ago Amazon said (about the same issue raised 14 years ago): "We’ve received similar requests from many of our customers and we definitely understand how important this is to your business; We hear you loud and clear. As it stands right now, we are planning to implement some features that are requested on this thread, though we don’t yet have a timeline to share." [0] In other words, they know people need it, but they prefer not to implement it. [0] https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=58127 https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=58127

Uptrenda 7y ago

Yeah sign me up for being annoying at this. Several times I'm just like: "why the hell can't I just pay for this thing up front and know what I'm spending." Then there's also both Google Cloud, AWS, etc not letting you spin up certain machines because of "quota limits" which you have to apply to raise. It's like: WTF? do they want your money or not? Idk why it's designed like this but it's a horrible experience.

hackbinary 7y ago
There is significant regulation for prepay of things in many jurisdictions. Eg gift cards, and it is likely that the cloud businesses do not want to enter that mine field. Yes some of them have gift card programs already, but they probably don't want expanded regulations to contend with large sums of money.
forty 7y ago
It's designed to limit the damage when people put their AWS admin credentials on GitHub or in their Android app and someone uses it to mine Bitcoin :)

balakk 7y ago

There are other ways to setup guard-rails in Azure - policies are one such feature: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/governance/policy/tutorials/create-and-manage#implement-a-new-custom-policy https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/governance/policy/tut... They may not necessarily enforce spending limits - but it's possible to restrict provisioning of costly resources, or even whitelist resources that can be provisioned. Almost every Cloud Foundation project nowadays involves setting up these guard-rails.

ridaj 7y ago

Hmm... I'm a big fan of fixed-budget or prepaid services, but between network, storage, VM costs, etc., what should the provider stop serving if you exceed the spend? Create an outage for your whole service? Throttle egress? Start randomly killing VMs?

clmckinley 7y ago
I think for their hard limit on MSDN funds, MS shuts down everything that creates incremental costs. As far as i know they don't delete anything, even things like storage that have an associated cost. That said, i am pretty sure the the TOS for MSDN funds say they are not be used for production systems.

jpalomaki 7y ago

Having reliable hard limits for production accounts can be technically difficult as you need to do billing in real-time and also make decisions on what services to kill once the limit is reached. Do you just stop VMs, do you automatically delete data from storage. Many things could result in loss of production data. There can be also many reasons for the budget overrun. It's not always a user error. It could be issue with the platform itself such as error in billing system or faulty autoscale logic. Or it could be caused by an external event, such as denial-of-service attack. (Not sure how things work with the MSDN subscription credit, but at least you are not supposed to be running production workloads with those)

maest 7y ago
Just because the decisions are difficult to make doesn't mean there's no need for this feature or ways to implement it.

Twirrim 7y ago

At the risk of bringing up the dreaded name here, these kinds of billing shocks were one of the problems Oracle wanted to solve with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). So it has been built from the ground up with variable limits and quotas in mind. Every service has them from the outset so that customers can control their maximum expenditure. When they started out building OCI, the major clouds weren't offering this as a key feature. Enterprise companies do not want infinite billing. They want fixed and reliable billing, more than anything else. With on-prem equipment they know a few years in advance what their expenditure is going to be at any time, and will have a budgeted amount over the top of that that they're on-board with. Bring the idea of autoscaling with limits, and they're very happy indeed, particularly with the idea of automatically scaling down. > Azure has, built in, hard price/cost limits but doesn't allow the public to use them. For example if you have MSDN subscription credit you get a hard limit of up to $150/month, but you yourself cannot pick a bespoke limit to use the service more safely. I would be willing to bet that that is something enterprise customers can get access too, particularly if their annual expenditure is high enough under normal operation. Microsoft knows the enterprise market very well, just like Oracle does, and like Amazon doesn't (historically speaking, at least).

markus_zhang 7y ago

Once you set up a subscription service and are selling that service to a huge number of people/companies, rarely that you or one of your salesmen don't want the clients to spend a large sum of money on the service unintentionally and then discount partially as a goodwill. Have seen it in sales of all kinds of services. It's just that they have different tricks.

qiller 7y ago

There are also individual limits on number of cores per account, etc - something we ran into when we needed to quickly scale on Black Friday, and the support too forever to get back to us even with priority A ticket.