It is baffling why cloud providers don't have that option.
I might want to have an app because I don't mind spending 50 dollars on my pet project as a hobby, but I don't ever want to spend more than that. Not if I write a wrong query that's suddenly becomes very expensive, not when I got attacked, and not even when I have legit users.
By the way, the same goes for some companies, too, just the threshold would be different.
It's not complicated to add configurable hard limits for these companies but they don't allow it because the current situation is more interesting for them.
They want to suck the maximum money from consumers before they realize.
For one person that will complain wildly and having to do a gesture, there are hundreds other companies that will not notice or just pay without recourse.
> They want to suck the maximum money from consumers before they realize.
This is a naive understanding of how corporations like Google and Amazon work. Bad will and using gym membership tactics aren't how they scale or make money. Getting you to confidently try things knowing you won't get charged (the reason they have those free tiers) so you'll get your company, your start-up, your next side project on it is much better for business.
It's a miss that things like this aren't implemented and widespread, not by design.
> It's not complicated to add configurable hard limits for these companies but they don't allow it because the current situation is more interesting for them.
I'm not in this space, but from my observations:
- Each service has a different billing model and metering model. Most likely this data is held by the service. I'm familiar with AWS so I'll use them as an example. I'd wager only DynamoDB or only Lambda (the service owners) know how much of those services you've consumed
- Billing is most likely reconciled asynchronously after collecting all data from all services by an entirely different department with knowledge of payments and accounting
- GCP, AWS, Azure launch 50+ services a year
- Each large customer most likely has a special rate. I bet Samsung or Snap pay an entirely different set of rates than the normal customer. There are thousands of these exceptions
- Cutting your service off when your over the limit is an incredibly complex set of edge conditions. Your long running instance hosting your critical service is shut off because of experimenting on a new ML workflow?
Even with only the above I can see the difficulty in globally limiting your spending limit at an accurate level. I know there are features for both AWS and GCP and they try.
It's easy to stand on the sidelines and handwave away technical complexity at scale, but I'd encourage you to give all of these providers a more charitable view, at least on this topic.
>Bad will and using gym membership tactics aren't how they scale or make money.
Except they do that with their actions.
>Cutting your service off when your over the limit is an incredibly complex set of edge conditions.
Sure! But if they cared about customers as you claim, they'd let users set hard limits, and when one of these mishaps happened, stop the services when their system eventually knows that the quota has been exceeded... and, make the user only pay the hard limit as the maximum amount. If this continues to happen, warn the user that their account will be terminated... and that's that. But they'll never do that.
Most of their clients pay for these mistakes because they don't have the reach or skills to make this a viral social media article to get people's attention and hence get them to forgive the costs.
I'm sure they know how much they make in revenue because of these mistakes and they deliberately don't do anything about it.
I work in this space and you’re absolutely correct. Your last paragraph hits the nail on the head for pretty much every complain people have about the public clouds.
Right, so let's say Congress passes a bill that requires cloud providers to enable hard spending limits by start of February 2021, and eat any extra usage costs that exceeded a set limit.
What is your educated guess by when this feature would be essentially correctly implemented in AWS and GCP (essentially = negligible costs to the providers due to either false negatives (bills they eat) and false positives (PR fallout, when SomeSite gets shutdown despite not being over limit)?
The fact that the dashboards and alerts have a delay sounds like there might be difficult consistency stuff going on. Many nodes need to coordinate their usage and billing. It may be a difficult problem, but solving billing problems might not really motivate anyone at the company. It's not a "cool" problem for engineers and not profitable for product.
>> The fact that the dashboards and alerts have a delay sounds like there might be difficult consistency stuff going on.
I think that's true. It's easier to measure usage and aggregate that data after the fact than to meter it in real time and stop at a limit. Those are very different things. What happens if you hit the cap while running multiple processes spread across a cloud?
One improvement might be to throttle things as the cap approaches but that doesnt really change the problem at all. Do that and have provider eat any overages should solve it from the user point of view.
Theres an easy solution: You set a limit and everytime a service needs to spend some many it allocates a small portion of the budget and after some threshold it will put unused money back to the budget. The only downside is that your spending limit will be reached to optimisticly, but i prefer that to paying thousands more than i wanted to. Knowing the system works like maybe a lower and higher threshold for the budget could be set.
Every time a GCloud rep would ask us about what we need, we would say: fix the billing interface. As far as I know, it never got fixed. The feelings I would get when looking at cloud billing interfaces can be summed as: obfuscated, like a pawnshop, and caveat emptor. I kind of came to the conclusion that if the cloud giants are not fixing their billing interfaces, then just like Amazon not sending you the details of the items you ordered by email and thus causing you to use the app to help with primenesia, there is a 'business' reason why the billing interfaces are generally incomprehensible.
They want to suck the maximum money from consumers before they realize.
I have very little money so I just don't use their services because a mistake would be disastrous. They might be losing out on me making a unicorn app on their platform. It's unlikely, but while the possibility of catastrophe exists I'll stick to not using them. That extends to not recommending anyone uses them either in case the worst happens.
Then the harsh reality is: companies don't care. Yeah, your app might turn out to be a unicorn, but the overwhelming odds are that it won't. And no one cares that you'll tell your other broke friends to avoid the service.
We'd all like to think it to be different, that a company might care about appeasing my broke ass. But as already pointed out, they want the whales. I also wonder, despite the number of years "cloud services" have been around, if companies aren't still trying to figure out a gazillion other things and limiting customer spend might be a bit low on the priority list.
The highly price sensitive customer will force you to compete only on price. That's just forcing yourself into a commodity market. It's bad business. I would never try to cater to that market. Very dangerous. Competition will drive margins down to near zero.
For hobby projects you probably don't need auto-scaling, and should use a provider that charges a fixed monthly rate. You'll "waste" a little bit of money on unused uptime, but for a hobby project it will be a minuscule amount.
> It is baffling why cloud providers don't have that option.
...is it? If a lazy dev leaves their corporate account open and you can bill it for their negligence, protected by the contract you already signed, you earn a lot of money. From a purely business perspective, it is stupid(!) to provide a stopgap for that.
Edit: to be clear I am not advocating one way or the other. But it is surprising that people are "baffled" by this obvious profit optimization.
Google is around a trillion dollar company, your $75,000 is a completely immaterial amount to them. Not to mention it would be a one time payment that would drive away customers and lead to bad PR like this post.
I might want to have an app because I don't mind spending 50 dollars on my pet project as a hobby, but I don't ever want to spend more than that. Not if I write a wrong query that's suddenly becomes very expensive, not when I got attacked, and not even when I have legit users.
By the way, the same goes for some companies, too, just the threshold would be different.