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0 pointsdanpalmer1y ago0 comments

So I've stored some data in a bucket, the storage time goes over my budget, what do you do now? Just delete the data? I think most people would think that's a terrible outcome.

Let's say the answer is yes, you just delete all the data as I can no longer afford it... delete operations are billable, so do you charge the user for those deletes or not?

Let's say the answer is yes, and you bill the deletes. What happens if too many deletes are required and suddenly you're at 2x the bill cap? Now you can't document the bill cap as being able to go over by up to 1.5x. This may be unlikely, but customers use cloud services in weird and wonderful ways.

This is just one resource type, there are many different resource types on a typical cloud provider, each with multiple axes of billing, each of which has hard decisions to not just be made, but documented and communicated to customers in such a way that they understand the impact. Oh and also it's the "I just put my credit card in and go" crowd who you have to explain it to, who aren't engaging in sales conversations, not those on business contracts who might actually listen or read the documentation.

It's not at all obvious to me that this is preferable to just having someone look at these incidents on a case by case basis and seeing who should be refunded.

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4 comments · 2 top-level

thot_experiment1y ago· 2 in thread

This is an insane take, there are many options here. The idea that the reason to structure billing this way is anything OTHER than that it's the most profitable way to do things is ludicrous. It doesn't matter if you can construct some other plausible reason, as long as it's the most profitable way to operate why would I believe the cause to be something other than profit maximization.

danpalmerOP1y ago

What alternative do you suggest? I'm not saying providers should delete data when hitting a cap, but rather that this is one example of why you can't cap spend.

It is possible to combine all the billing axes for things like this so that, but when you do you get Dropbox, or Google Drive. The explicit value proposition of cloud hosting is paying for what you use, and generally granular services are lower margin and more commoditised than higher level services.

thot_experiment1y ago

You could just throw an error, freeze services and do whatever "let someone handle this on a case by case basis". It's absurd to suggest that the customer doesn't want to have the option to prevent their spend from growing by multiple orders of magnitude without a human in the loop. Sure maybe deletes are a billable action (also absurd and fake), but having the options to say "hey I can't spend more than X, cut my service if my spend + cleanup would cost more than X" is absolutely doable and something many people would want.

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plorkyeran1y ago

If writing data to a bucket would push the monthly cost for data storage over the budget, the write should fail, not succeed and then delete something else to get the data back under the limit. Why would you even consider doing it that way unless you're specifically going out of your way to write the worst possible form of billing cap?

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