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Comment by kaishiro | Hacker News Reader

"Every other cloud does this! They all have non-production subscription types with hard spending limits."

This is simply not true, to the best of my knowledge. GCP has budget limits, which can send alerts, but outside of manually catching a pubsub and shutting down billing on your own, there are no configurable hard billing limits.

I'm unsure what to make of the rest of your rant.

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You can write a cloud function to automatically run when you go over the budget and shut down billing. They provide code for doing so in the docs:

https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/notify#cap_disa...

I'm not sure if that's what you meant by "manually catching a pubsub" -- you have to manually set up the script once, but it will run automatically when triggered.

If we're talking about protecting users still trying to learn the cloud, what if they mess up the setup of this cloud function?

It's worse – for us, budget alerts often arrive several hours after the fact, when you already might have burned lots of money.

Yes, well aware. I'm not sure if you actually looked at the code on that page but you have to catch the pub sub in the deployed cloud function in order to shut down billing on the project/account. This is precisely what I was referring to.

AWS has that too - you can trigger actions on budget alerts such as stopping activity https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws-cost-management/get-started...

What we need, a function that is AWS maintained and supported, that basically is AWS responsibility - that if it did not work - failed to shut down service that was consuming all the budget, they eat the cost.

The budget limits are delayed hard billing limits. Everything I've seen/heard suggests while you can go over, they absolutely don't charge the overage.

This is simply false.

We go over our budget "limits" literally every month. We do this because they are simply alerts, nothing more. We have separate alerts set up for 25, 50, 75, and 100% of our "limit" so that we can track variable usage and catch spikes early.

We, of course, pay our full bill every month - over the "limit".

^this. For business-critical operations you almost _never_ want to have your service shut down, especially as a surprising result of a big spike in usage.

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