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> They want to suck the maximum money from consumers before they realize. This is a naive understanding of how corporations like Google and Amazon work. Bad wi
by ctvo 6y ago
> They want to suck the maximum money from consumers before they realize.
This is a naive understanding of how corporations like Google and Amazon work. Bad will and using gym membership tactics aren't how they scale or make money. Getting you to confidently try things knowing you won't get charged (the reason they have those free tiers) so you'll get your company, your start-up, your next side project on it is much better for business.
It's a miss that things like this aren't implemented and widespread, not by design.
> It's not complicated to add configurable hard limits for these companies but they don't allow it because the current situation is more interesting for them.
I'm not in this space, but from my observations:
- Each service has a different billing model and metering model. Most likely this data is held by the service. I'm familiar with AWS so I'll use them as an example. I'd wager only DynamoDB or only Lambda (the service owners) know how much of those services you've consumed
- Billing is most likely reconciled asynchronously after collecting all data from all services by an entirely different department with knowledge of payments and accounting
- GCP, AWS, Azure launch 50+ services a year
- Each large customer most likely has a special rate. I bet Samsung or Snap pay an entirely different set of rates than the normal customer. There are thousands of these exceptions
- Cutting your service off when your over the limit is an incredibly complex set of edge conditions. Your long running instance hosting your critical service is shut off because of experimenting on a new ML workflow?
Even with only the above I can see the difficulty in globally limiting your spending limit at an accurate level. I know there are features for both AWS and GCP and they try.
It's easy to stand on the sidelines and handwave away technical complexity at scale, but I'd encourage you to give all of these providers a more charitable view, at least on this topic.
- beoberha 6y agoI work in this space and you’re absolutely correct. Your last paragraph hits the nail on the head for pretty much every complain people have about the public clouds.
- patrec 6y agoRight, so let's say Congress passes a bill that requires cloud providers to enable hard spending limits by start of February 2021, and eat any extra usage costs that exceeded a set limit. What is your educated guess by when this feature would be essentially correctly implemented in AWS and GCP (essentially = negligible costs to the providers due to either false negatives (bills they eat) and false positives (PR fallout, when SomeSite gets shutdown despite not being over limit)?
- AntiImperialist 6y ago>Bad will and using gym membership tactics aren't how they scale or make money. Except they do that with their actions. >Cutting your service off when your over the limit is an incredibly complex set of edge conditions. Sure! But if they cared about customers as you claim, they'd let users set hard limits, and when one of these mishaps happened, stop the services when their system eventually knows that the quota has been exceeded... and, make the user only pay the hard limit as the maximum amount. If this continues to happen, warn the user that their account will be terminated... and that's that. But they'll never do that. Most of their clients pay for these mistakes because they don't have the reach or skills to make this a viral social media article to get people's attention and hence get them to forgive the costs. I'm sure they know how much they make in revenue because of these mistakes and they deliberately don't do anything about it.