Google tried to charge me $1000 for a service normally costing $1 / mo because of a runaway restart issue. I had a $2 / mo "max budget" on it and we responded within minutes of receiving a budget alert. I only got them to reverse the charge after doing a ton of work to prove that my team reacted in <15 minutes, and it was their budget alert that was more than 6 hours late. They still seemed to think that was fine (?!) but because I had some great graphs and a HN-oriented blogpost ready to go, they reversed it anyways. That sounds kind of like blackmail, now that I think about it, but no more than what they're doing sounds like fraud.
To me, this says that the shortcoming has been noted, and then a product manager has argued against implementation. If I squint I can even justify it - shutting down a website right when it gets hugely popular is not something that's easily reversed, while it's pretty easy for GCP to write off a bill for $1k.
The tutorial's budget hard limit system is actually kinda interesting as it dogfoods GCP - the budget-hit notification is sent via GCP pubsub, and a lambda (aka Google Cloud Function) then removes the billing account from the project, which shuts down the project's resources.
https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/notify#cap_disa...
(To be clear, having to write/tweak code and deploy this myself is a suboptimal solution to the problem but it's neat from an engineering perspective.)
on the face of it, them exceeding their max budget probably puts them in the wrong if this went to third-party arbitration
i'm a total outsider but it does feel like the walls are closing around smaller players as the big get bigger.