alt Hacker NewsThis goes beyond dollar charges. For production code to be reliable, everything needs to have a hard limit.
Queue lengths, request sizes, response wait duration, message payload size, authentication attempts, allocation rates -- there's always some upper number beyond which the system is so messed up you'd rather it crashes.
> An argument against this is that businesses don’t want their hosted applications to start throwing errors because some budget was exceeded. I expect that most businesses and individuals would prefer errors to a surprise $10,000+ bill.
Indeed. If you want a surprise $10,000 bill that's still not an argument against a hard cap -- just set it at $9,999,999 instead, or wherever you don't want the surprise bill. There's always a number that indicates something has gone insane. There's always a sensible upper limit to any operation.
Yup. Things happen. I'm still picking up the pieces because somebody sent a complex job through broken down into a bunch of separate pieces. Maybe 10x as many parts as normal (and each part caused the run of an external process, a third of them failed to start), one report came back something like 100x as big as normal. All local stuff so it didn't cost anything beyond the production stall.