Google Cloud customer wakes up to $18,000 bill despite $7 budget

victor106•about 2 hours ago

Why doesn’t GCP provide a way to say “shut down all my services if my cap is reached”?

ReptileMan•about 3 hours ago

That is quite hostile to their consumers, no matter how they spin it. If you put a budget on something it should be capped.

dpoloncsak•about 2 hours ago

I am the last person to defend Google Cloud and it's awful UX.

With that said, when you go to set a budget it warns you "Setting a budget does not cap resource or API consumption. Learn more." with a hyperlink to https://docs.cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/budgets?_g...

Telaneo•about 2 hours ago

The only way I can read that is 'setting a cap does nothing' but reading that tells me that it only turns on email notifications. Not any better really. It's simply not a cap. It's an alarm.

sunaookami•about 2 hours ago

Yes, there is no way to set a budget for Google Cloud. And alarms are delayed up to two hours (!)

7bit•about 2 hours ago

Click here to let the puppy life*

* By clicking here you agree to kill it

And you're defending that?

perryizgr8•about 2 hours ago

I think I read somewhere that calculating and limiting cloud usage costs is a really hard problem. But I feel that if Google were motivated to do it, they can do it. It's hard, not impossible. They just don't care to solve this particular problem.

subscribed•about 2 hours ago

If they can COUNT it and charge based on that, that means they can count it and react.

If I, not having their budget or engineers, can have pretty much instant Prometheus event reacting to metrics, surely it wouldn't be too hard for them to have triggers like this -- somehow their AI can automatically ban people based on something, can't they do something for the customers?

They can, just don't want to.

jdgoesmarching•about 2 hours ago

It’s hard on AWS as well, but I agree. There’s just no incentive for the billing experience to be better.

AlotOfReading•about 2 hours ago

It's the same fundamental problem as view counters, something Google is famously good at solving. Eventually consistent solutions are well-understood, and wouldn't have these kinds of massive cost-overruns.

lazide•about 2 hours ago

Depends on latency. 24 hour delays on an eventually consistent counter used for billing absolutely would cause this problem.

Google Cloud customer wakes up to $18,000 bill despite $7 budget

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