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Comment by startages | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, that the main reason I never use services like Google Cloud if I don't have to, it's impossible to have a hard cap, and anyone pretending to be an expert, is just off. Google says that they can't provide a hard cap because that would mean shutting down all your services..bla bla, but at least give users the option.

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We have spend caps at the billing account level and the project level (developer set) in the Gemini API now. There is up to a 10 minute delay in processing everything but this should significantly mitigate the risk here: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/billing#tier-spend-cap...

By default, new Tier 1 paid accounts can only spend $250 in a given month.

I'm sure it's me being an idiot, but once again I spent 20m trying to figure how to do a specific thing in google-land and still haven't figured it out. Even if I did set it somewhere, I see things like "Setting a budget does not cap resource or API consumption" with a link to a bunch of documentation I have to analyze.

This is what working with cloud services is like, in my experience. Azure's UI feels like it was made as a joke flash game on Newgrounds.

I just find it extraordinary that the biggest tech company in the world can do cutting edge real time AI for millions of people, run Youtube and of course all the other google services with having literally the smartest people in the world and unlimited resources on board, but still can't keep real time track of the user's current billing and their spending limits, it's all best effort still. Somehow it doesn't add up. (Pun not intended, but I'm happy to have it)

If spending caps made them more money they'd find a way;)

Not just Google, also Microsoft and Amazon. Real-time cost tracking is technically impossible to solve according to the major cloud providers. I have huge respect for those sales & finops engineers.

Not just tech companies, telecommunications too.

Poooooor AT&T, goodness it's hard to know how much data they just sent to us. Hard twenty years ago, just as hard today.

Technically impossible for them because real-time attribution cuts into margin. Config-layer tracking does not have that constraint. You do not need real-time billing data if you know from the agent config that it is going to explode before it runs. That is the distinction Traeco is built on. traeco.dev

How much of a bill can you run up in 10 minutes?

€26,000 per the fine article

The providers will not ship hard caps because a hard cap is a revenue ceiling. They will ship soft alerts that fire late enough to be useless. The only answer is an independent layer between your config and the provider that does not have that incentive. Building exactly that at Traeco. traeco.dev

It shouldnt mean shutting down all your services, it should mean not letting you provision new ones and limiting the scope of what you can continue doing.

If I budget enough to store 1TB of data for 1 month, then on the first day of the month I store 2TB of data - what should the behaviour be after 15 days?

Read/write access should be frozen, data should be saved for 1 month so you have time to react to warning emails. If you didn't upgrade in that time, it should be deleted.

Nuke the data. It’s gone forever if you didn’t back it up elsewhere. This should be a meaningful risk mitigation that I can employ to avoid having a catastrophic financial disaster.

This isn’t a limit I’m setting at some percentage above expected costs, it’s: “I don’t want to take out a HELOC if something goes wrong”

Unfortunately, a lot of people keep their backups in the same cloud account as their primary data. Thinking that multiple copies and multiple availability zones are sufficient.

For these users, the article’s €54k bill would be replaced with their business data getting wiped out.

You know that's not how the cloud works. If you're build by the hour for compute and that compute is powering a server, the only way to stop that is by shutting off the compute, breaking the server.

I would love to have a “if the bill for this hobby project becomes a threat to my ability to pay my mortgage, nuke it.” If I cared about the data enough. I’d have backed it up.

And just shut down the service which is surging.

If you have a lambda set up that normally runs a hundred times a day, and suddenly it tries to spin up 10 million instances, it should block that unless you specifically enable it.

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