Having your instances run at 100% CPU pretty much raises a red flag at any cloud provider. Depending on your plan it either gets shut off (like in this case) or you get a notice about "suspicious" behavior and a bit of time to fix the "issue".
I run my own iron, with cloud only for elastic loads. Every time I launch a cloud instance, it will be using 100% CPU, otherwise I wouldn't launch it. It's unacceptable to label that profile as "suspicious". It never happened to me on AWS or Azure.
The major indicator here was the lack of payment history, so they hadn’t paid for it but were working off of credit. I think it’s a nuance that’s very important.
From the description I imagine Digital Ocean offers a free period or tier, to reduce friction in customer acquisition. This is a marketing tool, and must not, in any way, cause situations like the one described.
If a marketing tool induces service failure, it has no place in a professional setting.
But it is important to disconnect monetary spending from coupons or vouchers as they are not equivalent.
You mention free tier but that’s not what was at issue here. Also, 10 additional instances isn’t in the free tier of any cloud service I’ve used.
I’m not saying that DO is correct, but I believe the parent argument was a simplification if the events in question. Also, DOs handling of it via support was far worse than the initial algorithm, imo.
They must be. If they are not, then you've entered the territory I referred, where marketing actions are impacting service availability. This impact is not acceptable in professional services.
In this specific case, if voucher giveaways produce ingress of resource leeches (cryptominers that will never result in real customers), and if it is impossible to prevent this undesired ingress without impacting existing customers (which it is), then that marketing action must stop. This is the conclusion I expected from the post-mortem.
I won't try to argue whether they should be removed in their entirety, that's not even an option I had even considered until now.
Using what you've rightfully obtained shouldn't be regarded with suspicion.
Are you suggesting that 100% usage implies fraud?
There's a difference between suspecting fraud from high resource usage and equating high resource usage with fraud.
The latter is what is happening, here, and its outrageous.
- A large increase in number of nodes
- All nodes using 100% of CPU
- AND a lack of payment history
I'm merely saying that the lack of payment history is an important indicator of suspicious activity. 100% usage by-itself was not the primary indicator that their article discusses.
They’ve botched that second step though.
It's a common pattern in malicious actors to immediately spin up several droplets and immediately peg the CPU on each one.
There are, obviously, non-malicious actors who do the same, but it's a bit like wearing a balaclava in public: Likely to raise some suspicion just because it's associated with malicious actors.