upvote

points

by vrosas1 days ago |
comments
upvoteby _drg91 days ago|
next
[-]
The quota we needed increased far beyond the usual was the YouTube API. The startup was a media editing and publishing tool, with a feature to upload videos to YouTube on your behalf. Uploading a video requires a ton of quota, which they gave us.

Regardless, dropping all quotas to 0 effectively killed our GCP account.

reply
upvoteby vrosas1 days ago|
parent|
next
[-]
Interesting. I guess we’ve learned an important lesson in not building businesses around APIs that don’t have an SLA…
reply
upvoteby Dylan168071 days ago|
parent|
next
[-]
How many services have meaningful SLAs for extreme downtime?

Github and (parts of) AWS will give you a small discount at 0.1% downtime, a bigger discount at 1% downtime, and AWS will refund the whole month for 5% downtime. But beyond that they don't care. If a particular customer gets no service at all then their entire $0 gets refunded and that's it.

reply
upvoteby _drg91 days ago|
parent|
prev|
[-]
That was just a feature of the product to be helpful. Not a core function at all.
reply
upvoteby MichaelZuo1 days ago|
parent|
[-]
If you werent willing to pay for an SLA, and they clearly werent going to offer one to you… why is it surprising if literally no promises were made in writing?

Why would they intentionally lose money on your private commercial activity without even that?

reply
upvoteby 1 days ago|
parent|
prev|
[-]
deleted
reply
upvoteby agwa1 days ago|
prev|
next
[-]
They denied my request for a service account quota increase even though my use case[1] was literally straight from their documentation. They only increased it after I complained on Twitter and got retweeted by Corey Quinn.

[1] https://www.agwa.name/blog/post/accessing_your_customers_goo...

reply
upvoteby Dylan168071 days ago|
prev|
[-]
> Quota for what?

Sure, I'm interested too.

> In my experience the GCP service quotas are pretty sensible and if you’re running up against them you’re either dealing with unusual levels of traffic or (more often) you’re just using that service incorrectly.

Well 0 is not sensible, and who cares if it's weird if they got detailed approval and they're paying for it.

reply
upvoteby vrosas1 days ago|
parent|
next
[-]
Sure, but the comment is so vague I’m skeptical the OP knew what they were doing in the first place, or it happened exactly as they wrote. Maybe a service quota was reset to the default? But just set to zero? Doesn’t pass the sniff test.
reply
upvoteby Nifty39291 days ago|
parent|
prev|
[-]
"... and they're paying for it..." - that might be the exact issue. Google has no way to ensure that these small shops and startups will pay their bill, so quotas are used to prevent the company from running up a large bill they won't be able to pay.

I see a bunch of threads on reddit about startups accidentally going way over budget and then asking for credits back.

This doesn't at all mean the startups have bad intent, but things happen and Google doesn't want to deal with a huge collection issue.

If someone rolled up to your gas station and wanted to pump 10,000 gallons of gas but only pay you next month - would you allow it?

reply
upvoteby 3eb7988a16631 days ago|
parent|
next
[-]
Well that is kind of a problem of their own making. The clouds refuse to entertain the prospect of pre-paying for services/having some sort of hard spending limits because they know that over-allocation is probably driving a decent amount of revenue.
reply
upvoteby bilekas1 days ago|
parent|
[-]
I dont really understand ops problem as I've been able to set monthly limits on expenditure. Seems trivial to setup.
reply
upvoteby dpkirchner1 days ago|
parent|
[-]
Are you sure you're not thinking of billing alerts? AFAIK there is still no way to set spending limits at GCP.
reply
upvoteby bilekas1 days ago|
parent|
[-]
I'll admit it's a bit obscure But there is info here.

https://docs.cloud.google.com/apis/docs/capping-api-usage

Or you can do it programmatically.

https://docs.cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/disable-bi...

reply
upvoteby vrosas1 days ago|
parent|
prev|
[-]
That’s not how quotas work in GCP. Google sets quotas for certain APIs for interacting with GCP itself, like how many VMs you can create per second. They’re not billable. Sometimes these quotas can be be increased if you need them to be. But the way op described it makes no sense.
reply