Comment by rcbdev

Comment by rcbdev 7 days ago

2 replies

With all due respect, what?

First of all, thank you so much for obviously writing part of this via a Large Language Model. Second of all, what kind of argument is "The commit message claimed '60% cost savings'" - do you have any idea what you were actually doing? And lastly, addressing your question:

> Do you set hard budget caps and accept downtime?

If you have no clue what you're doing, yes! Especially for early prototyping, why not? IaaS offerings will also just create downtime for you as well if you need more resources than you've provisioned. It's normal. Either you set up a system where you can rely on dynamic scaling or you don't and set hard limits.

You asked your cloud provider to provision resources, and you were billed for them. If you can't handle working with a cloud provider, you might want to look into less scalable but in turn more cost stable infrastructure solutions.

creativesage 7 days ago

Appreciate the directness, and fair point. That’s exactly what I find confusing about their setup and why I’m here trying to learn.

A little more context: I’ve been on GCP for 4 years, App Engine for the majority of it. Expensive but stable. I’ve used Gemini in the past to reduce costs successfully, so this wasn’t my first attempt at optimizing.

I take ownership of the outcome, but the config behavior still doesn’t match my mental model and Google support hasn’t been able to clarify how to properly scope this either, which is why I turned here.

  • 9x39 7 days ago

    > the config behavior still doesn’t match my mental model

    Could you -learn- how to self-host a version of your app to expand your mental model in doing so? You outsourced the thinking part to an LLM - a bag of words - and are surprised the outcome didn't just work?

    > Google support hasn’t been able to clarify how to properly scope this either

    More outsourcing of thinking, no? Is Plan A really asking the vendor selling you compute how to use less compute and make them less money, instead of figuring out how to use just enough of it yourself?

    If you're taking ownership, who could have effected the outcome the most here? Maybe the person who keeps outsourcing thinking to LLMs, support requests, and forums? I'd argue ownership would look more like figuring out how to handle Top Cost #1 yourself and reduce burn rate, starting by doing less outsourcing.