Comment by vrosas
11 hours ago
Quota for what? In my experience the GCP service quotas are pretty sensible and if you’re running up against them you’re either dealing with unusual levels of traffic or (more often) you’re just using that service incorrectly.
The quota we needed increased far beyond the usual was the YouTube API. The startup was a media editing and publishing tool, with a feature to upload videos to YouTube on your behalf. Uploading a video requires a ton of quota, which they gave us.
Regardless, dropping all quotas to 0 effectively killed our GCP account.
Interesting. I guess we’ve learned an important lesson in not building businesses around APIs that don’t have an SLA…
How many services have meaningful SLAs for extreme downtime?
Github and (parts of) AWS will give you a small discount at 0.1% downtime, a bigger discount at 1% downtime, and AWS will refund the whole month for 5% downtime. But beyond that they don't care. If a particular customer gets no service at all then their entire $0 gets refunded and that's it.
That was just a feature of the product to be helpful. Not a core function at all.
> Quota for what?
Sure, I'm interested too.
> In my experience the GCP service quotas are pretty sensible and if you’re running up against them you’re either dealing with unusual levels of traffic or (more often) you’re just using that service incorrectly.
Well 0 is not sensible, and who cares if it's weird if they got detailed approval and they're paying for it.
"... and they're paying for it..." - that might be the exact issue. Google has no way to ensure that these small shops and startups will pay their bill, so quotas are used to prevent the company from running up a large bill they won't be able to pay.
I see a bunch of threads on reddit about startups accidentally going way over budget and then asking for credits back.
This doesn't at all mean the startups have bad intent, but things happen and Google doesn't want to deal with a huge collection issue.
If someone rolled up to your gas station and wanted to pump 10,000 gallons of gas but only pay you next month - would you allow it?
Well that is kind of a problem of their own making. The clouds refuse to entertain the prospect of pre-paying for services/having some sort of hard spending limits because they know that over-allocation is probably driving a decent amount of revenue.
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That’s not how quotas work in GCP. Google sets quotas for certain APIs for interacting with GCP itself, like how many VMs you can create per second. They’re not billable. Sometimes these quotas can be be increased if you need them to be. But the way op described it makes no sense.
Sure, but the comment is so vague I’m skeptical the OP knew what they were doing in the first place, or it happened exactly as they wrote. Maybe a service quota was reset to the default? But just set to zero? Doesn’t pass the sniff test.