3 ms·

I strongly disagree that this is in any way defensible, despite that both Google and AWS do it. You should be able to set a limit, and even if they can't cut of

I strongly disagree that this is in any way defensible, despite that both Google and AWS do it. You should be able to set a limit, and even if they can't cut off exactly at the limit, they should be able to cut off when you hit (say) 2* your limit, or in the absence of a limit, perhaps issue progressively louder warnings until you hit 10* your usual spend, with the ability for you to give affirmative consent to uncap if you're hoping your app will suddenly take off. Nobody needs to lose their house or their life savings to some teracorp just because "it's hard."

adriand 2y ago
I totally agree. You should be able to choose to have things shut down rather go past a limit. I don’t have a single client that would choose $70k versus, say, a couple hours downtime while we figure out what is happening with a resource that is going crazy. This is where I question the risk of serverless. Although, now that I think about it, while my one client’s EC2 instances are essentially capped in terms of capacity and spend, we also use S3 etc. I suppose it would be entirely possible to accidentally write a huge amount of data to S3. But again I would rather get warnings from the app that writing to S3 has failed due to limits than get a huge bill!
- danpalmer 2y ago
  But you also pay for data at rest in S3. Should S3 stop storing that data while you figure things out? Should they bill the customer for the deletion of that data as they normally would? I don't disagree on wanting this feature, but it's just not something that's possible to implement in totality when you dig into the details.
  - adriand 2y ago
    Could it work based on deviance from norms? Like a setting where you say, I’m okay with up to two standard deviations from our typical write volume but that’s it? Or, alternatively, just let me set the size of the volume. Treat it like a hard drive? In terms of your point about the data at rest, part of the issue is that we get a bill once per month, and that’s probably when we would notice it. Of course there is probably a Cloudwatch alarm or something we could set (I assume) but there’s so many damn services…
    - danpalmer 2y ago
      This is sort of what quotas enforce, and most cloud services have quotas. You ask for an increased quota if you reach the current one, or the system might sometimes automatically increase it if it thinks you will need it. This all trades off though against the possibility of bringing down one of your customers when they are hitting peak sales on their website, which is a very bad look.

adriand 2y ago

I totally agree. You should be able to choose to have things shut down rather go past a limit. I don’t have a single client that would choose $70k versus, say, a couple hours downtime while we figure out what is happening with a resource that is going crazy. This is where I question the risk of serverless. Although, now that I think about it, while my one client’s EC2 instances are essentially capped in terms of capacity and spend, we also use S3 etc. I suppose it would be entirely possible to accidentally write a huge amount of data to S3. But again I would rather get warnings from the app that writing to S3 has failed due to limits than get a huge bill!

danpalmer 2y ago
But you also pay for data at rest in S3. Should S3 stop storing that data while you figure things out? Should they bill the customer for the deletion of that data as they normally would? I don't disagree on wanting this feature, but it's just not something that's possible to implement in totality when you dig into the details.
- adriand 2y ago
  Could it work based on deviance from norms? Like a setting where you say, I’m okay with up to two standard deviations from our typical write volume but that’s it? Or, alternatively, just let me set the size of the volume. Treat it like a hard drive? In terms of your point about the data at rest, part of the issue is that we get a bill once per month, and that’s probably when we would notice it. Of course there is probably a Cloudwatch alarm or something we could set (I assume) but there’s so many damn services…
  - danpalmer 2y ago
    This is sort of what quotas enforce, and most cloud services have quotas. You ask for an increased quota if you reach the current one, or the system might sometimes automatically increase it if it thinks you will need it. This all trades off though against the possibility of bringing down one of your customers when they are hitting peak sales on their website, which is a very bad look.