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sandorscribblesyesterday at 4:22 PM1 replyview on HN

if you need to bump a quota above the predetermined range of what googlers think is "normal" usage (which is far too low to run anything at scale)you have to talk to a human to negotiate the quota bump. why? because googlers in their infinite engineering wisdom use "gcp quotas" not as a cost optimization guardrail for customers benefit, but to inform google on when and how much metal they need to buy for their datacenter region you are running in.


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verstyesterday at 4:46 PM

I have to defend the Googlers here (I work at a different hyperscaler). Teams / services need to optimize their COGS. That means optimizing infrastructure cost. A lot of pay as you go service may not have any base cost to customers but they require some infrastructure to be provisioned. Without quotas you can have a lot of provisioned infrastructure which does not produce any revenue to even collectively break even. Just yesterday this a decision we evaluated again in my team. As a team we cannot afford an unlimited quota - both because of what that would do to our bottom line and because we can't necessarily obtain all the quotas we need ourselves to provision enough capacity for our dependencies. It's a difficult trade off requiring manual intervention.

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