6 ms·
It's a pain. I recently had a compute job that would take a couple of days to run locally. "This is exactly what the cloud is for," I thought and went to Google
by tveita 4y ago
It's a pain. I recently had a compute job that would take a couple of days to run locally. "This is exactly what the cloud is for," I thought and went to Google Cloud where I already had an account.
First try I'm allowed to spec up a beefy server with AVX-512 and click "create", but it never actually starts. Turns out the default CPU limits are tiny - I need to apply to bump two separate limits and wait for that to go through.
Second try I'm actually able to spin up a couple of servers. I set the compute job running and go for lunch. An hour later both are terminated and I get a message about "violation of our Acceptable Use Policy".
There is a link that says crypto mining is forbidden on free instances. I send a reply informing them that a) these are not free instances, and b) I am not mining crypto.
I get a reply back saying more or less "Yes it says free instances but why would you expect anything we write in the documentation to be correct. Also you might think you weren't mining crypto but actually your VM was probably compromised because no one would buy compute instances and actually run compute jobs on them. We're not giving you back access to your instances, maybe delete them and create new ones lol."
I actually find it an easier product to get started with than AWS, but man they really really don't want your money. When you are actively trying to prevent your customers from scaling up resources you are failing at being a cloud.
- dilyevsky 4y agoImo these tiny quotas are specifically put in bc a lot of people (especially on this site) always complain how they managed to rack a huge bill by accident. You can’t have it both ways
- iam-TJ 4y agoSeems like it'd be simple to deal with that: Allow people to pre-pay (deposit) an amount of their choice and set an account flag "Do NOT exceed account balance".
- dilyevsky 4y agoYou will have to do transactional billing at cloud scale which isn’t really feasible
- richwater 4y agoI hate this excuse. AWS, GCP etc are not designed for children. They are designed for serious, enterprise-level workloads. People need to do their due diligence.
- pannSun 4y agoYou can't have what both ways, specifically? User-facing spending and capacity limits that are hard to accidentally set too high, without also unilaterally and without warning terminating compute nodes for opaque, alleged ToS violations when their compute actually gets used?
- fdgsdfogijq 4y agoThis isnt why. Its because these services cant scale to everyone having unlimited quotas
- dilyevsky 4y agoIf you have quota that doesn’t prevent stock out at all which cloud support will be happy to tell you when you have tons of quota but can’t spin up any more VMs in a region
- kevincox 4y agoNo, but it provides some control. They will stock out if everyone suddenly uses their entire quota (they aren't reservations) but by limiting the quotas that they issue they can reduce the impact of single actors or large swings of smaller actors on availability. Basically it improves the predictability of resource usages by limiting outlier spikes.
- modeless 4y agoWell maybe if they implemented reasonable ways to cap your bill then they wouldn't need have to have all these arbitrary hidden limits. It's ridiculously difficult bordering on impossible to make sure that a usage spike or bug won't cause an infinitely large bill, on any service they offer. App Engine used to be the exception with an actual spending limit, but (of course) they deprecated and removed it.
- mirker 4y agoThe latency to query cost is on the order of hours on user side so the service would be off the limit by the cost rate * cost latency. That’s my guess for why it’s not a feature.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 4y agoI 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.
- mirker 4y agoSee 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).
- Terretta 4y agoThis 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.
- wkdneidbwf 4y agono way. it’s because they can’t scale to unknown demand.
- dilyevsky 4y agoHaving quota does not guarantee you get the resources. Commit is supposed to (but not really)
- mirker 4y agoThe system approves requests by how trustworthy you are. It does this so: 1. You can’t denial of service the cloud or something else 2. Launder money through mining cryptocurrency 3. Take popular instances away from high profit customers
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- g42gregory 4y agoI am curious why would they care if you mine crypto or not? If you pay for an instance, why not?
- schaefer 4y agoIf they don’t fight that use case, I suspect they become a lightning rod for stolen credit card transactions.
- 1123581321 4y agoIt's bad for the rest of us customers. a) more effort goes into fraud, more risk of annoying false positives, b) easy to max out resource utilization which shortens hardware lifespan, c) boom and bust industry makes planning harder which means they can't run on as predictably low margins. This all increases costs and makes free tiers harder to offer. Miners are an easy group to say no to because they don't overlap much with the rest of the software business world, so the reputation hit is small.
- dilyevsky 4y ago$20 says 100% of crypto mining in cloud = your customer got p0wned
- ILike42Cookies 4y agoOh, thats an easy $20. I mined Ethereum in azure during the height of the crypto boom, and looking at my statistics of vms i was able to get i am pretty sure some other people did to. On 5k$ spend on azure i got round about 7k$ in Etherum when sold the next day, this includes german Sales tax and some loses i made starting out when not accounting for the german sales tax early on. I think the whole timeline where this worked was about one and a half weeks(Germany, if you played around with exchange rates and sales tax potentially a bit longer), but it worked pretty well. Azure was also perfectly fine with me doing it.
- shalmanese 4y agoYeah, and once that brief period of easy arbitrage was over, 100% of all people who are paying $10 to mine $1 worth of crypto are people who are trying to steal the $10.