Thread

1. motionlessveloc · 1791082849 · focus · HN ↗

   I used to work on a support team of a well known backend type service that had hard budget caps.

   It was, unfortunately, a nightmare. There were tons of tickets and even threats of lawsuits from customers whose service got cut off hard at the worst possible time due to organic growth/going viral/big event/nobody knew about the limit/etc. Not only did they lose all the leads and revenue they would have gotten from that bump, but they also pissed off their own existing users who suddenly couldn't use the service either.

   Generally speaking, it's much better to use alerts instead of hard limit. Even in the worst case (hackers pwn your credentials and mine Bitcoin or whatever) the rest of your business is unaffected and you can negotiate with the billing department at comparative leisure.

   This is all assuming you have humans operating the service. If you're letting AI agents yolo infra in prod, you have a whole series of new problems.

   1. aenis · 1791084553 · focus · HN ↗

      I think it's not generally 'much better' to use alerts. People - end users - are by now quite used to seeing things go down for a while. No biggie. But a infra oopsie can kill a company in ways a short outage won't.

      And its of course not just people yolo'ing with AI. People were quite capable of causing such outages themselves just fine. Distributed, serverless systems are hard.

      1. bluGill · 1791136467 · focus · HN ↗

         Alerts are only good if somebody responds to them each and every single time. If you don't have someone with authority who can respond to every alert and will do that as part of their job, then they're worthless. Part of responding of course is understanding what it means.

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