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Comment by marcinzm | Hacker News Reader

What left a bad taste in my mouth is any quota increase getting rejected unless you got on a phone call with sales and listened to an upsell speech. I'm trying to give you money and you're putting roadblocks in front of me.

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I don't know why all the cloud companies make you jump through so many hoops to get more quota - but Google has consistently been the fastest for me. Fill out some random Google Docs form (why does it have to be so dodgy?), receive quota within 24 hours.

Contrast:

Microsoft - flat out refused me more quota despite spending 10k/mo with them. Required me to convert to invoice billing, and then wanted a bunch of proof of incorporation and when my trading name didn't match my registration name they were unable to proceed.

Oracle - took 3 months of escalations and deliberations, required me to explain on the phone to a VP why I needed the quota.

AWS - frequently requiring me to write up a spiel about what I'm going to do with the quota before they approve it, increasing the RTT to 72hrs+ - do they actually verify this? How would they? Why do they care so much? We've spent 50k+ and always paid the bills, what's the issue?

There are several valid reason to do this - concerns about customer solvency and making sure you aint gonna crash tbheir house of cards architectures to name a few. The bigger problem is when those requests get stuck in the bureaucracy hell and all three major cloud provider companies are known to be extremely bureaucratic

Microsoft was the most baffling - happy to give me 25k+ credits for free in their startup program, unable to let me pay them for the same setup going forwards.

My quota requests weren't outrageous - never more than 20 VM's, albeit very large VM's.

It is not your quota that is the problem, it is the credit risk.

If you paperwork is not up to spec, they are running the risk of credit exposure when you the customer doesn't' pay. Higher risks for any provider when there is no legal entity to sue etc, which is why they want you to convert to invoice billing.

That's because Google's quota increases are binary:

- either they're automatically approved because you fill in a form requesting more and it just becomes a PR for an engineer to approve, OR

- it can't move because you've hit an internal service limit

Wait, really? Quota are recorded by code that must be changed by pull request, not an entry in a db? That sounds like an insane waste of engineer time.

A not uncommon flow was:

- google form submission

- creates a PR with the project ID and the requested value as an exception in a file (this requires OWNERS approval, so at a min one eng/pm to approve)

- file would update a DB the next time it's picked up

It's not as bad as you think, the PRs are written on their own and the engineer in question probably blanket approves all of them every morning while they're checking email (quickly scanning them looking for automated red flags).

Occasionally I'd get an escalation asking for product approval, but generally yep, it was an auto-approve if it's within the predefined range.

Not generally. There is a quota service for all modern gcp APIs that handles per region, per user, and per project quotas that internally you just need the right permissions to update for a customer request, no PR required.

Ah, so everything's finally been moved to superquota? I was also living in an app engine world, where everything was... Old and broken.

Heaviside step function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaviside_step_function

My experience has been very different: I update the quota in the console and it's approved very quickly.

I had it happen three times on the same account including a hidden quota that the UI didn't even list. Sales person said that it might get better if we moved to invoice billing instead of a credit card (why?). After that I just gave up and moved back to AWS.

edit: It's also not a new account, very consistently paying for some services (maps, etc.) for years before I decided to ramp up.

edit2: It was also a tiny quota increase from the default one so not like we suddenly asked for five hundred instances.

Yeah this happened to me recently and it was obnoxious

I was really impressed by how simple it is to increase quota on AWS. It was just simple elastic IP quota increase and few things related to VPC quotas. I haven't used Google cloud as much, so I can't comment on it.

If you don't mind me asking, what quota increase was rejected?

A relatively small GPU increase so we could do some machine learning project testing. We asked for I think 8 T4s which are like $180/month each if run 24/7.

I had a similar problem. We wanted to get on a call to resolve it quickly, but was instead forced into an email chain where I received a reply every 3 weeks.

I've done about 6 requests for increased over the last 2 years and all have been accepted. All I had to do was giveca valid business case like:

"We are setting up more customer environments and are running out of X"

It was usually increased within the hour.

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