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I think it's largely about capacity. Even if you have the money they don't want you to randomly spin up up a few hundred GPU instances for 6 hours because it will end up causing capacity issues for all of the other people trying to also allocate those instances. GPU's are in crazy high demand and I doubt even GCP, Azure, or AWS can get their hands on enough of them. Contrary to what cloud providers may have you believe you can't actually spin up hundreds of instances unless you already have thousands of instances or you've talked to them and have already told them you're going to spend millions of dollars with them and got the quota pre-approved.

> Contrary to what cloud providers may have you believe you can't actually spin up hundreds of instances

I've had three software engineer jobs, learned this lesson on the first one and watched others get tripped up by it in the other two. Nobody ever believes me when they say "We will just spin up a instance for every file in the directory" or similar and I respond with "No you won't, they aren't going to give you a thousand instances". This is a lesson that can only be learned first hand.

For GPUs, yeah. If you're talking compute though, you just keep requesting your limits be raised until you're happy. You'll probably hit your ability to pay before you hit actual AWS limits. Talk to your AWS TAM if you have questions on what your spend has to be before they'll give you that kind of access. If you don't have a TAM then you might be too small.

s/might/are/

> "No you won't, they aren't going to give you a thousand instances"

AWS regularly gives me a few hundred instances at a moments notice.

Sure, they’re given back just as quickly after the jobs are done, but it’s certainly not impossible.

Someone probably called ahead and made a arrangement. In my experience you get tatpitted after a while, the API requests take longer and longer until eventually they time out.

That's why spot pricing exists.

It's basically an auction market. You set your max price to bid on instances, and will get them as long nobody else bids higher.

This used to be true. As of 2017 or 2018, it is no longer a bidding system, but a published price that AWS offers based on capacity.

More details here:

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/new-amazon-ec2-spot-pri...

It's still a bidding system in some sense in Azure.

You set your max price, up to the on-demand price, and then you'll get your VM... or not. If you do get the VM, you still don't pay the full price in most circumstances unless demand is very high.

AWS famously lets you spend billions overnight, so it can't be that big of a problem.

I suspect it's mostly Google being Google and horribly at customer service, even when the customers are waving money at them.

Google customer service is atrocious. Their ability to solve customer support issues is effectively a toss up.

Please do better Google.

You shouldn't need to ask Google for mercy. When a company gives you bad service you should be free to leave for a competitor. If you are not able to you need to ask yourself why you are willing to put up with such abuse?

There is a reason they are #4 behind AWS, Azure, and Alibaba.

So many European companies are obsessed with Google Cloud. Azure and AWS is a distant afterthought there. I don't know why.

> I'm not sure it would solve the "whoops, I just accidentally wasted 6 figures, can I have it back?" problem Google presumably implemented this policy to fight.

Or the "with enough GPUs I can quickly launder a large pile of cash I scammed off the elderly/businesses/etc. into crypto currency before this account gets frozen" problem.

There are other ways to launder money, for example casino, gift cards or betting on sports.