He looked completely surprised when I asked about runaway billing and why there wasn't any simple options to cap a given resource to prevent those cases.
His response was that they didn't build that because none of their customers wanted anything like that, as far as he was aware.
I think the reason this doesn’t get prioritized is that large customers don’t actually want a “stop serving if I pass this limit” amount. If there’s a spike in traffic, they probably would rather pay the money to serve it. The customers that would want this feature are small-dollar customers, and from an economic perspective it makes less sense to prioritize this feature, since they’re not spending very much relative to customers who wouldn’t want this feature.
Maybe if there weren’t more feature requests to get prioritized this might happen, but the reality is that there are always more feature requests than time to implement them, and a feature request used almost exclusively by the smallest dollar customers will always lose to a feature for big-dollar customers.
Removing a major concern that prevents individuals / small customers from using GCP in the first place; so more of them do use it
That could then lead to value in two ways:
- They make small projects that go on to be large projects later, (e.g. a small app that grows / becomes successful, becomes a moneymaker)
- Or, they might then be more inclined to get their big corp to use GCP later on, if they've already been using it as an individual
But that's long term, and hard to measure / put a number on
Having implemented this on behalf of others several times, I'll share the common pain points: * There's a long lead time. You need to enable Cost Explorer (24-48 hours). If you're trying for fine distinctions, activating tags as cost allocation tags is another 24 hours * AWS cost data is a lagging indicator, so you need to be able to absorb a day of charges * Automation support is poor, especially for organizations * Organization budgets configured at the account level are misleading if you don't understand how they're configured
What's really wanted here is that AWS needs to commit to more timely cost data delivery such that you can create an hourly budget with an associated action.
Followed by a list of caveats that make it wholly irrelevant for an individual who is afraid of a surprise charge covering less than several days.
... right up until it's their own bottom line that is at risk, and then like magic spending limits become a critical feature.
For example, Azure has no stop-loss feature for paid customers, but it does for the "free" Visual Studio subscriber credits. Because if some random dev with a VS subscription blows through $100K of GPU time due to a missing spending constraint, that's Microsoft's problem, not their own.
It's as simple as that.