Thread

1. joshdavham · 1791078994 · focus · HN ↗

   It’s incredible that in 2026, AWS and GCP are only just now introducing this. It’s possibly one of the most obviously needed features for a cloud provider.

   Also, does anyone know why it’s taken this long? I suspect it’s a technical reason. While one could be cynical, I doubt it’s an intentional business/product decision. Hard spending caps are both excellent product differentiators and could possibly save these providers money as they don’t have to forgive their users when they accidentally over-use a service.

   1. simonw · 1791079818 · focus · HN ↗

      It's definitely technically difficult. You can't easily estimate how much an operation is going to cost before you kick off that operation, which means as soon as you get close to the limit you are at risk of tripping it.

      Consider something like a "select * from bigtable" SQL query that might process a trillion rows. Hard to know that's going to cost $100 until after you have run it.

      1. nvader · 1791081164 · focus · HN ↗

         Yeah, we probably want some kind of traffic light system:

         Green means go Orange means finish what you're doing but don't start anything new Red means stop everything

         And probably a special rule to permit stable, critical spend through regardless, the same way we allow police and ambulance to run lights.

         1. Gigachad · 1791081417 · focus · HN ↗

            Stop everything is pretty damaging any real business though. Things were better in the era of VPSs. You paid for a fixed amount of compute, if you ran a stupidly expensive operation than it just maxed out your system for a certain amount of time and things slowed down. But you didn’t kill the service entirely and you didn’t have unlimited potential price

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