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by vrosas 138 days ago
Quota for what? 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.
3 comments

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.

Interesting. I guess we’ve learned an important lesson in not building businesses around APIs that don’t have an SLA…
That was just a feature of the product to be helpful. Not a core function at all.
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?

> werent willing to pay for an SLA

According to who?

> no promises were made in writing

Most big businesses won't promise anything. That doesn't make their actions reasonable.

> Why would they intentionally lose money

You made this up.

Also if they were losing money on some feature, they could change the quota for just that feature.

Are you confused?

Clearly I was not asking for random role play on how another HN user may answer a direct question.

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.

> 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.

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.
"... 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?

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.
I dont really understand ops problem as I've been able to set monthly limits on expenditure. Seems trivial to setup.
Are you sure you're not thinking of billing alerts? AFAIK there is still no way to set spending limits at GCP.
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...

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.
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...

Why didn’t you just have the customer create a service account and then send you the key? Or you’d just have one master service account and the customer would give you permission to impersonate the one they created? I’m sorry you ran into this but there were other solutions.
Having the customer send me the key is less secure because that key never gets rotated. Google wants to discourage long-lived credentials so badly that new organizations can't even create service account keys by default anymore.

Having the customer grant permission to a single master service account is vulnerable to confused deputy attacks.

In any case, why should I have to pursue "other solutions" to something that's in their documentation?