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. hn_throwaway_99 · 1791140251 · focus · HN ↗

      I think you may be confusing the issues here, especially if the "well known backend type service" you are referring to is AWS.

      I got bit by some undocumented (or at least very poorly documented) hard limits in AWS when our app went viral. It was extremely difficult to just find out what these hard limits actually were. And most importantly, we never explicitly set them, they were just hidden defaults in AWS.

      That's very different from having an easy to use, visual dashboard of where and what all your hard limits actually are, and make it it extremely easy to turn them off or on at a moments notice.

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