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Comment by asciimike | Hacker News Reader

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

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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

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