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Comment by plantain | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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