[arcticfox]

I get furious every time this comes up and somehow there are bootlickers ready to defend big tech on it.

My ~2 person small business was almost put out of business due to a runaway job. I had instrumented everything perfectly according to the GCP instructions - as soon as billing went over the cap the notification was hooked up to a kill switch, which it did instantly.

GCP sent the notification they offered as best practice 6 HOURS late. They did everything they could to not credit my account until they realized I had the receipts. They said an investigation revealed their pipeline was overwhelmed by the number of line items and that was the reason for the lag. ... The exact scenario it is supposed to function in. JFC.

[Barbing]

Almost wish the people defending it were paid. Almost more intelligent to rush to the defense if there were a direct financial benefit.

Part of it is possibly the curse of knowledge. Someone in the 99th percentile of cloud configuration experts simply can't recall their junior dev days.

[charcircuit]

In my junior dev days I always paid for the resources I used. Just because you consume a lot of resources by accident that doesn't mean you shouldn't have to pay for it. Accidents do not absolve you from liability.

[arcticfox]

It's not about not paying for the resources you use. It's about not having any mechanism to limit those resources, despite that being an entirely reasonable thing for the cloud providers to provide.

Using these platforms is like giving everyone in your business a credit card with an infinite limit. If someone steals it, or anyone makes a mistake, your liability is literally unlimited for no reason at all other than complete laziness by the counterparty.

These are completely normal and expected concepts in commercial contracts that the cloud providers just have no respect to provide. I would even wager that their bigger customers have this in their contracts and only SMBs get screwed like this.

[franga2000]

This is not about paying or not paying. It's about cloud providers not having working tools that let you limit your spending.

If I don't set up a budget and run up a huge bill, fine, sure, I should probably pay for it. But if I follow best practices and set up a rule like: "if usage > X €, then stop accepting jobs", and I do it correctly according to the vendor's instructions, yet it still lets me blow past the budget, that's entirely on the vendor.

[Barbing]

Interesting!

I know software is special. That's why software defects are acceptable while a crumbling bridge is not.

With that said, should this apply to other industries? If I clip a warehouse shelf on my first day driving a forklift, should my wages be garnished for life to cover the inventory? Or is the inherent nature of the logistics industry such that an accident does not always imply liability? (Or other)

[charcircuit]

The employer is held liable in such a scenario.

[Barbing]

Sounds right. Not sure if this is the position:

If you’re coding, you should pay for your mistakes, if you’re driving a forklift (sober/responsibly), your employer should pay?

[charcircuit]

If you are coding your employer pays for it too. If I take the site down and we lose $5 million I am not personally liable for that.