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Depends. For my hobby project that hasn't been monetized, being charged $100k is way worse than it going down. If it were critical infrastructure, or monetized
by lkbm 2y ago
Depends. For my hobby project that hasn't been monetized, being charged $100k is way worse than it going down.
If it were critical infrastructure, or monetized in a way that brought in revenue to cover the charge, then maybe I don't want it to shut down despite skyrocketing costs, but that's hardly the only situation you could be in.
- tptacek 2y agoNobody is going to charge you $100k.
- immibis 2y ago(ignores the multiple hobbyists who accidentally got charged $100k)
- tptacek 2y agoMy belief, and you can correct me on this if you have evidence to the contrary, is that nobody actually pays those bills.
- withinboredom 2y agoSomeone paid those bills to somebody. AWS has costs incurred from it (support, opportunity, etc) and they paid them.
- bee_rider 2y agoFrom that point of view, the cap seems more like a common-sense self defense feature that the cloud provider would want to implement. But we have cloud providers in this thread saying they don’t want to implement caps, so, I dunno.
- withinboredom 2y agoFrom my technical understanding from a few friends who may or may not know what they are talking about, the caps issue has to do with the processing delay between billing events being emitted and understood. That by the time the billing events have been processed and action taken, the damage would already be done in all but the most extreme cases. Secondly, the best solution is to simply stop everything. But now the customer has to cold-start their entire infrastructure, which may actually cost more than paying the bill. Thirdly, it is likely that customers will set a billing limit and then forget about it years later. Suddenly, they've got a complicated infrastructure setup spanning the globe. They finally hit a scale where they hit their billing limit that they had completely forgotten that Bill configured in their early days (who doesn't even work there anymore). Suddenly, the entire global infrastructure is shut down in the middle of the night. That's the gist of what my friends said.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- tptacek 2y agoI'm just going to refer people to this comment.
- srockets 2y agoGetting charged is not the same as paying those charges. I'm willing to bet real money that all who, in good faith, went and asked not to pay those bills ended up not paying them (if they didn't ask, that's a separate issue).
- bitbasher 2y agoPerhaps that is true, but the stress and anxiety from seeing 100K bill is real and has an impact. https://www.forbes.com/sites/sergeiklebnikov/2020/06/17/20-year-old-robinhood-customer-dies-by-suicide-after-seeing-a-730000-negative-balance/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/sergeiklebnikov/2020/06/17/20-y...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- tobyjsullivan 2y agoIf you're stressed over lighting $100k on fire, then you're not the target market. /s
- gary_0 2y agoJust in case you don't know, the person you're replying to is the author of the blog post, and they mention in it that being stressed out by (potential) unexpected large bills is something they are aware of. Although even then, "we will only threaten to charge you $100k without meaning it" isn't much of a reassurance.
- brundolf 2y agoBut more importantly: just let the customer decide! Let them decide whether there's a threshold where an outage is less costly than the hosting, and what that threshold is