Currently my supposedly free micro instance on GCP is projected to costing 1.50€ per month. Obviously I'm very greatful for free computing, that's very nice. It's actually the main reason I'm even entertaining using the cloud for things and bothering to try things out. My complaint isn't about that, it's about the fact that their stated cost isn't the actual cost. It does seem to actually cost something. No, not network costs. It says "E2 instance core" and "E2 instance ram". It will be very interesting to see whether I get an explanation for this and whether they will take the money. In the first month they already took a few cents for the 2-3 days I ran it.
I don't know if irony is the right word but the GCP cost only has to go slightly higher and I can already switch off the cloud to a standard VM somewhere to have cheaper compute. Imagine that, I'm not a 100k/month spender like some here, I'm a free user and it's already almost cheaper for me to switch off the cloud.
Whatever heuristics cloud providers tend to use to discover and "remediate" such behavior is a totally different thing (e.g. obliterating an established account when an API key might have gotten leaked and a few GPUs let loose is a little overboard), but if I was offering a similar compute service, and its sole purpose wasn't just coin mining, I'd almost certainly ban it as well for similar reasons.
They can also use an absolutely incredible amount of resources, because it's not their money. Two hundred A100 GPU's for a week? Sure, why not?
Historically GCP/GAE has had a more generous free tier without credit card requirements, so they've always been a bit stricter on this than the other clouds.
Source: Worked at a cloud infra provider that struggled deeply with this problem.
Generally speaking you're not going to get banned unless you spin up max quotas and have other signals for fraud, such as zero payment history, connecting from regions with high fraud rates, etc. More often the provider will just limit your resources - either openly, like AWS does, or more subtly.
Unless that's exposed to the customer (AWS burstable instances are actually okay IMO), that sounds like the cloud provider committing fraud and hoping nobody calls their bluff.
> Any act of deception carried out for the purpose of unfair, undeserved and/or unlawful gain.
(https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fraud#Noun)
Is the cloud provider getting money off of this arrangement? => Yes, obviously they're getting paid here.
Is the cloud provider getting that money as a result of deception? => Yes, by selling ex. the use of 1 CPU core when they actually have no intention of letting you use that core. Now, I'll grant that in an actual legal case it might well be possible to get away with this by burying it in the ToS, but this is HN, not a court room, so I'm comfortable setting the bar at "would most actual users expect that to happen based on marketing?", conclude that no, most users would consider that surprising even if there's something buried in the ToS claiming that it's allowed, and call a spade a spade.
the worst part is that there's somebody in a GCP office somewhere that might secretly believe that I'm actually a cryptobro. shudder
you're probably safe on that front, it isn't like the GCP folks are paying any attention to the customers.
In either case (gym or GCP) you'll be entitled to a refund for the difference. They aren't allowed to just kick you out and pocket the difference.