Is this a soft limit or a trajectory prediction? I think there isn’t such a thing as a soft limit. Nobody wants to spend any money really right? But you need to spend some to avoid losing service. That’s just a cost you don’t like but need to pay.
I definitely get the idea of: I don’t want to spend X so if it looks like I will, terminate service at Y. But I think that’s a special case of the general situation, I want to know how much I’m on track to spend, right?
But I don’t know much about this at all. My whole experience was accidentally getting my own personal self a $500 AWS charge and then deciding they cloud services were dumb.
> Is this a soft limit or a trajectory prediction?
I don't know. I just tried to frame the problem from a customer's point of view, because cloud vendors' statement that customers would not like a limit is (IMHO) limited by their POV. Customers do want a limit, but not the way that cloud vendors would implement it. I think a huge part of the problem is understanding what exactly it is that you need when you use a cloud service. (This is varying from customer to customer, and from service to service, of course. You usually have important services that must be running, and others where an outage would be unpleasant but not critical.)
> Nobody wants to spend any money really right? But you need to spend some to avoid losing service. That’s just a cost you don’t like but need to pay.
That is not the issue. From a customer's POV, I would be ready to spend extra to keep the service running, but there is a limit where I'd prefer an outage because I can't bear that much. There are two problems with that: First, the limit is blurry. Second, a simple hard limit would leave me with a huge bill AND an outage. I would want to be able to choose one of those evils, not be left with both. And these two problems compound.
> But I don’t know much about this at all. My whole experience was accidentally getting my own personal self a $500 AWS charge and then deciding they cloud services were dumb.
I don't think they are dumber than the alternative. If you run your own hardware, you have a hard limit in both cost and computing power. You could technically get that with the cloud too, but it is not usually offered because it doesn't really solve the problem, but neither does it for for your own hardware.
That said, it would be nice if the major clouds would offer a "hard limit" option, but it really only works for "unimportant" applications that are cost-sensitive and can take an outage.
I definitely get the idea of: I don’t want to spend X so if it looks like I will, terminate service at Y. But I think that’s a special case of the general situation, I want to know how much I’m on track to spend, right?
But I don’t know much about this at all. My whole experience was accidentally getting my own personal self a $500 AWS charge and then deciding they cloud services were dumb.