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As a developer I have an adversarial relationship with the Cloud even though I use it all the time. The reason for that is money / billing. As soon as a credit

As a developer I have an adversarial relationship with the Cloud even though I use it all the time. The reason for that is money / billing. As soon as a credit card is in the relationship exploration and experimentation is over for me. My local Linux machine may go on fire but it will never send me an invoice no matter what I do.

gw99 4y ago
It’s even worse than that really because it only takes a small slip into some of the cloud-native services and that adversarial relationship is entirely unavoidable and unportable and you are stuck with it. Which is exactly what is demanded by the providers to get the best cost-benefit relationship in the short term. Of course the human race is entirely cursed by short-term thinking. The true cost of all technology is only apparent when you get the exit fee invoice.
cube00 4y ago
A cynical view would be the billing is designed to trip you up. As an example, if you use Azure with a Visual Studio subscription which includes credit, once the credit is used all of your services are suspended and no further charges are incurred. As a pay-as-you-go customer this option does not exist. You can set a billing "alert" but that doesn't stop the charges.
- fragmede 4y ago
  It's kind of weird that it's not just a built in toggle button to the system but GCP has the primitives to let you suspend the system when a threshold is met. https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/notify#cap_disable_billing_to_stop_usage https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/notify#cap_disa...
  - cube00 4y ago
    Shame it doesn't actually protect you, this startup [1] had a spending limit and they racked up charges so fast even Google's own billing system couldn't keep up. In typical Google fashion it's luck of the draw if you get saved or lose your home [2] [1] https://blog.tomilkieway.com/72k-1/ https://blog.tomilkieway.com/72k-1/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25378899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25378899
    - deleted 4y ago
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    - deleted 4y ago
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    - fragmede 4y ago
      Note that billing budget feature which they used, is, to use the technical term, fucking worthless. All that does is sends an email notification. I updated my post to link to the section about capping costs, though that still has the delay and won't totally save you.
      - danuker 4y ago
        > and won't totally save you What a pointless (and perhaps malicious) feature. If something slow is going on, I can check it manually. It is when something fast is going on that I need automated emergency stops.
  - monsieurbanana 4y ago
    Disabling billing, from your link: > Note: There is a delay of up to a few days between incurring costs and receiving budget notifications. Due to usage latency from the time that a resource is used to the time that the activity is billed, you might incur additional costs for usage that hasn't arrived at the time that all services are stopped. So still pretty useless. Apparently they do have real-time billing updates via PubSub, but then it's up to you to code what to do when you spend too much. If you're in an exploring phase for [GCP PRODUCT X] you're not going to preemptively write a safeguard to turn off [GCP PRODUCT X] in case of too high billing updates. It's better than nothing, but kind of a slap in the face that they do have all the tools to really allow people to have a hard spending limit, but they don't. I've heard the argument "but it's too dangerous, people might lose non-backed up data", but that also happens if you set a Billing Limit, just that the billing limit will kill all your projects AND still let you rack days of over-the-budget billing.
    - fragmede 4y ago
      The capping costs sample code in my updated link warns you that it will go and forcibly stop assets, possibly deleting data, due to suspended billing. It still has the same notification delay so it's not a total panacea, but it does help alleviate some of the fear that I'll accidentally end up with a huge bill at the end of the month due to a small misconfiguration or for forgetting to shut down a GPU instance or something.
- gosukiwi 4y ago
  Yeah that is quite scary. I'd feel much better if I could put a limit on the billing. Just shut everything down if I go beyond X amount of money.

gw99 4y ago

It’s even worse than that really because it only takes a small slip into some of the cloud-native services and that adversarial relationship is entirely unavoidable and unportable and you are stuck with it. Which is exactly what is demanded by the providers to get the best cost-benefit relationship in the short term. Of course the human race is entirely cursed by short-term thinking. The true cost of all technology is only apparent when you get the exit fee invoice.

cube00 4y ago

A cynical view would be the billing is designed to trip you up. As an example, if you use Azure with a Visual Studio subscription which includes credit, once the credit is used all of your services are suspended and no further charges are incurred. As a pay-as-you-go customer this option does not exist. You can set a billing "alert" but that doesn't stop the charges.

fragmede 4y ago
It's kind of weird that it's not just a built in toggle button to the system but GCP has the primitives to let you suspend the system when a threshold is met. https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/notify#cap_disable_billing_to_stop_usage https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/notify#cap_disa...
- cube00 4y ago
  Shame it doesn't actually protect you, this startup [1] had a spending limit and they racked up charges so fast even Google's own billing system couldn't keep up. In typical Google fashion it's luck of the draw if you get saved or lose your home [2] [1] https://blog.tomilkieway.com/72k-1/ https://blog.tomilkieway.com/72k-1/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25378899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25378899
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - fragmede 4y ago
    Note that billing budget feature which they used, is, to use the technical term, fucking worthless. All that does is sends an email notification. I updated my post to link to the section about capping costs, though that still has the delay and won't totally save you.
    - danuker 4y ago
      > and won't totally save you What a pointless (and perhaps malicious) feature. If something slow is going on, I can check it manually. It is when something fast is going on that I need automated emergency stops.
- monsieurbanana 4y ago
  Disabling billing, from your link: > Note: There is a delay of up to a few days between incurring costs and receiving budget notifications. Due to usage latency from the time that a resource is used to the time that the activity is billed, you might incur additional costs for usage that hasn't arrived at the time that all services are stopped. So still pretty useless. Apparently they do have real-time billing updates via PubSub, but then it's up to you to code what to do when you spend too much. If you're in an exploring phase for [GCP PRODUCT X] you're not going to preemptively write a safeguard to turn off [GCP PRODUCT X] in case of too high billing updates. It's better than nothing, but kind of a slap in the face that they do have all the tools to really allow people to have a hard spending limit, but they don't. I've heard the argument "but it's too dangerous, people might lose non-backed up data", but that also happens if you set a Billing Limit, just that the billing limit will kill all your projects AND still let you rack days of over-the-budget billing.
  - fragmede 4y ago
    The capping costs sample code in my updated link warns you that it will go and forcibly stop assets, possibly deleting data, due to suspended billing. It still has the same notification delay so it's not a total panacea, but it does help alleviate some of the fear that I'll accidentally end up with a huge bill at the end of the month due to a small misconfiguration or for forgetting to shut down a GPU instance or something.
gosukiwi 4y ago
Yeah that is quite scary. I'd feel much better if I could put a limit on the billing. Just shut everything down if I go beyond X amount of money.