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Comment by Jamie9912 | Hacker News Reader

That's really annoying though.. Why should I have to go out of my way to increase capacity given that i'm paying for it anyway?

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Generally these limits exist so customers don’t accidentally spend more than they intend to — e.g. implementing a sort of infinite loop where Lambdas call each other constantly. Sounds implausible but I’ve seen that more than once!

IMO that's not why they _really_ do it. They have limits on everything because even at their scale they can't instantly accommodate your needs to suddenly scale or they need to prevent "noisy neighbor" situations where your sudden excessive usage impacts others' workloads. They still have to do relatively short term capacity planning to accommodate you. Like, I work for only a medium-large sized company and AWS has quoted us lead times of _weeks_ to make the instances we need for a workload available. We only needed 200-300 EC2 instances and they weren't even super unusual types. I think their infinite scaling on a dime claims are pure marketing jibber jabber.

> Sounds implausible but I’ve seen that more than once!

The textbook example of this going wrong is a lambda that is invoked on uploading to S3 that writes the result to S3. There's even an AWS article on it - [0]

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/avoiding-recursive-invo...

We actually got an email from AWS recently at work that said “hey! Your lambda writes to a queue that invokes the same lambda, that seems wack”. We need it that way, but it’s enough of a problem that they built a way to detect it automatically.

I might believe this if AWS allowed customers to specify their own self-imposed billing limit. Do they have that feature yet?

I understand the sentiment behind your frustration - but it's worth noting that these support tickets are usually answered really quickly.

Specifically as it relates to Lambdas there's solid rationale behind these limits, but I agree that in many other cases the limits seem arbitrary and annoying.

The quotas are there for one good reason: the system running wild consuming way too much.

- for limited resources like IPs, it avoids one customer eating all the stock. Yes he’s paying for them, but other customers wouldn’t be able to get some anymore, generating frustrated users and revenue loss - for most other "infinite stock" resources, it avoids the bill exploding. It’s good for the customer, but also for the provider as they’re sure to be paid and not take a billing decline or sucking up all of a startup’s money.

One of the official reasons for the quota is to protect consumers from shooting themselves in the foot when they configure something incorrectly and start using the maximum available autoscaling resources which quickly makes bill to explode.

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