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That’s still a lot of hopes and prayers you do not end in financial ruin. Instead, the cloud providers could offer prepaid credits/billing maximums to let indi

That’s still a lot of hopes and prayers you do not end in financial ruin. Instead, the cloud providers could offer prepaid credits/billing maximums to let individuals sleep at night. I would love to run my side project off of AWS to gain the experience, but no way I feel comfortable with a potentially unlimited liability because I configured something poorly. My joke project can take the uptime hit if it means I know that I will never spend more than $X to host it.

Jach 3y ago
At least AWS sort of provides tooling to approximate this. I have some alerts setup in CloudWatch for anomalous Network Out, estimated charges exceeding a threshold, and a raw Network Out limit that if exceeded shuts instances down. Overtime, bandwidth costs have gone down for AWS. What's finally causing me to think about jumping ship (surprised OP didn't mention OVH's unmetered stuff) is their upcoming pricing per month for IPv4 addresses. The alternative is proxying through CloudFlare, which I don't particularly want to do.
- lxgr 3y ago
  It's still absurd having to hand-craft that type of protection against racking up enormous bills, especially with cloud providers now actively promoting their various "free" tiers to hobbyists. It reminds me of EU roaming before the regulatory cap, when a single video call close to the border could cost you thousands of Euros.
  - Intralexical 3y ago
    The thing is that GCP used to have this, but then got rid of it a couple years ago. So is there really demand for it in most of their customers?
    - 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
      Google killing a product cannot be used to assess popularity. Especially if the product’s existence would potentially hurt revenue.
      - Intralexical 3y ago
        It can certainly raise questions about popularity, however, as long as you also adequately consider their tendency for rent-seeking, monopolistic behavior, etc. In this specific case it's more that I'm having a hard time picturing serious "cloud"-based web companies that decide "Oh yeah sure we'll just shut our site down if we get too many visitors". That would mean this feature is useful primarily for hobbyists, which are more likely to be put off by (and react like they do to roaming phone charges to) uncapped costs (and also not a reliable source of revenue), weakening the revenue argument for removing the feature.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  Yeah, again "sorta" "approximates". AWS is famous for making those alerts hard to set and error-prone. Honestly, I don't understand why people (instead of large companies) use them at all.
jeroenhd 3y ago
I agree with you. I understand why a "shut down all services when this amount of money is spent" button shouldn't be enabled by default, but it should at least be an option. This is a good reason to avoid Amazon and friends. They're set up to let you fail, and that makes them terrible companies to host your private products with.
Intralexical 3y ago
GCP used to offer a simple type-a-number-here daily billing limit. For a small business or personal project you could even safely put it at something super low like $2/day (or much less), since their "Always Free" tier covered a decent amount of usage. You can still do it, but they got rid of the special-cased Console setting and instead provided a migration snippet to programatically control it using one of their cloud run/automation features or another. Ah, here's the page, I guess: https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/budgets https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/budgets Configuring a cap: 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...

Jach 3y ago

At least AWS sort of provides tooling to approximate this. I have some alerts setup in CloudWatch for anomalous Network Out, estimated charges exceeding a threshold, and a raw Network Out limit that if exceeded shuts instances down. Overtime, bandwidth costs have gone down for AWS. What's finally causing me to think about jumping ship (surprised OP didn't mention OVH's unmetered stuff) is their upcoming pricing per month for IPv4 addresses. The alternative is proxying through CloudFlare, which I don't particularly want to do.

lxgr 3y ago
It's still absurd having to hand-craft that type of protection against racking up enormous bills, especially with cloud providers now actively promoting their various "free" tiers to hobbyists. It reminds me of EU roaming before the regulatory cap, when a single video call close to the border could cost you thousands of Euros.
- Intralexical 3y ago
  The thing is that GCP used to have this, but then got rid of it a couple years ago. So is there really demand for it in most of their customers?
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
    Google killing a product cannot be used to assess popularity. Especially if the product’s existence would potentially hurt revenue.
    - Intralexical 3y ago
      It can certainly raise questions about popularity, however, as long as you also adequately consider their tendency for rent-seeking, monopolistic behavior, etc. In this specific case it's more that I'm having a hard time picturing serious "cloud"-based web companies that decide "Oh yeah sure we'll just shut our site down if we get too many visitors". That would mean this feature is useful primarily for hobbyists, which are more likely to be put off by (and react like they do to roaming phone charges to) uncapped costs (and also not a reliable source of revenue), weakening the revenue argument for removing the feature.
marcosdumay 3y ago
Yeah, again "sorta" "approximates". AWS is famous for making those alerts hard to set and error-prone. Honestly, I don't understand why people (instead of large companies) use them at all.

jeroenhd 3y ago

I agree with you. I understand why a "shut down all services when this amount of money is spent" button shouldn't be enabled by default, but it should at least be an option. This is a good reason to avoid Amazon and friends. They're set up to let you fail, and that makes them terrible companies to host your private products with.

Intralexical 3y ago

GCP used to offer a simple type-a-number-here daily billing limit. For a small business or personal project you could even safely put it at something super low like $2/day (or much less), since their "Always Free" tier covered a decent amount of usage. You can still do it, but they got rid of the special-cased Console setting and instead provided a migration snippet to programatically control it using one of their cloud run/automation features or another. Ah, here's the page, I guess: https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/budgets https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/budgets Configuring a cap: 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...