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Comment by arianvanp | Hacker News Reader

That sounds odd to me. Especially given that digitalocean is the default dynamic provider for Gitlab CI builds which _will_ run droplets at 100% CPU.

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From what I understand, they’re not saying you’re not allowed to use 100% for (what their user agreements define as) legitimate uses. They’re saying several droplets suddenly created and immediately going to 100% flags them as suspicious activity for human review. Looks like after such review, they would flag them as legitimate and all would be fine, 100% CPU or not.

They’ve botched that second step though.

Not sure what the materialization of that suspicion might look like -- competitors trying to crush DO's business? mass account creation or mass fraudulent logins? "mining crypto"? What I could come up felt quote-unquote legit grounds for a timed suspension but only instinctively so.

That doesn't make sense to me. You pay for the time you have the droplets running, so it seems kind of silly to have them sit idle for a bit before you give them work to do.

I don't work at a cloud provider, but I think the reasoning is:

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.

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