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I think this sounds easy, but it’s actually quite nontrivial in practice. You need special handling of such a limit for each kind of resource. E.g. when my lim
by cube2222 2y ago
I think this sounds easy, but it’s actually quite nontrivial in practice. You need special handling of such a limit for each kind of resource.
E.g. when my limit is reached to they remove the database, along with all backups, and all objects on S3? Since storage is billed, it should also be stopped when the limit is reached, right?
I think in practice among companies paying most of their revenue, there’d be zero interest in this, while it would be a lot of effort to implement.
This is really something specific to hobby projects, which just shouldn’t be using those “unlimited potential cost” services.
- candiddevmike 2y agoI don't think any of these requirements are necessary. A basic "if I reach my bill limit, turn off things that are billing" toggle would suffice for 80%+ of users, especially with better billing controls/per-team billing accounts. I think you run into more problems/user frustrations with a tenuous conditional-shut-off approach. My tinfoil hat is that a lot of cloud billing is accidental, probably from "lab environments", and they don't want to provide a way to budget/limit these.
- tptacek 2y agoThe whole post is about this accidental billing situation.
- cube2222 2y agoI mean, those S3 objects, those backups, those databases, are billing. “Turning them off” means deleting them.
- candiddevmike 2y agoSounds good to me, that's what offsite backups are for (if the data is even necessary)
- jabbany 2y agoIt doesn't have to be though? The provider could reject further access to them (reads / writes) once the limit is reached. The cost of actually keeping objects as "cold" storage has a natural cap per billing cycle since those are billed based on time.
- bee_rider 2y agoWhat if my bug was saving, like, way more data to the cloud than I expected, and suddenly having a big bill for the hard drive space my data is using up just sitting there? It would be a pretty dumb bug, but hey, you never know, right? In that case they have to choose to either delete my data or keep charging me, so I guess there isn’t an easy zero-cost “stop” option.
- HeatrayEnjoyer 2y agoIt there was a law about this companies would find a way. Where there's any uncertainty they can simply eat those edge costs, the extremely fat profit margins cover it easily.