Even if you manage to get your microservices to synch every penny spent to your payment account at realtime (impossible) you still have to waiver the excess, losing some money every time someone goes past their quota.
Trading platforms can guarantee a maximum slippage on stops, and often even offer guaranteed stops (with an attached premium), so I don’t see why Google and Firebase can’t do similar.
The way it works at present is ridiculous.
The fact that they don’t indicates that there’s no market reason to support small spenders who get mad about runaway overages, not that it’s technically or financially hard to do so.
Yeah no, physically impossible. If nobody is selling at that price, there is no guarantee your sell stop will execute near that price. They can sweep the market, find the best seller price and execute.
There might be a costly way to do it with microservices as I indicated, but your example easily falls apart.
Cloud providers would be taking way less risk interacting with their own services than a broker does interacting with the market. Perhaps they would be more at risk from bad actors, but it shouldn't be significant: they could reserve this behaviour for people who have already spent, say, $100 with them so you can't abuse it at scale.
I don't buy the 'evil corp screwing people' angle either. They are making farrr too much legit money to care about occasionally screwing people out of 20k and 50k.
We're not talking about an EC2 or EBS volume here, this is access to an API.
Why aren't we talking about an EC2 - is that not a cloud compute service? People have been complaining about cloud billing since long before LLMs.
Anything to say about the technical problem of constantly monitoring many services against a project or account-level limit?
I've worked on a number of systems and while it is sometimes impossible to stop at an exact limit, I am confident that it is feasible to stop with less slippage than occurred in this scenario. And at the companies I've worked at, within a margin of error that we're able to absorb any slippage ourselves, as these losses are made up elsewhere, and are worth the customer goodwill. If we can do it, I'm sure Google can.