I still find it bizarre that we can't cap the maximum number of instances.
If we could say "I never want any more than 5 instances", then this billing problem goes away - sure, your service will probably be hit with performance issues, but at least you are in more control of your outgoing costs. On Wednesday, 13 June 2012 09:20:23 UTC+1, nischalshetty wrote: > > We have been on GAE/J from more than 2 years now. We have 2 products that > run on it. A couple of weeks ago, I noticed an unusually high latency for > one of our products and as a result a high number of instances being > present (I guess if latency increases, the number of instances would > increase as well to serve new requests). > > I logged a production issue > (link<http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=7624>) > and the gae team took it up swiftly and started work on fixing it. Though > it took time to fix it, I was happy that they were in touch while fixing > the issue. > > Since the bump in instances was a result of the problem encountered due to > a degradation of GAE infrastructure, I thought it was right on my part to > ask for a refund of the extra billing charges that were levied. > > Our charges are usually in the range of $30 per day but during the 3 days > the charges were *$86, $188 and $47* (attached the screenshot). That's > pretty steep and it does hurt our weekly budgets as we're a bootstrapped > startup. > > When I contacted customer service and asked for a refund I was told that > the SLA is violated when there are exceptions thrown with error code 500. > Since that wasn't really the case here, we were denied the refund. > > In our case it was the latency(caused due to some problem with appengine) > that made our app take a big hit which means it isn't covered under SLA! In > case the GAE infrastructure degrades again, and instances spin up at a > crazy rate once more, it means we have to pay the charges. I dread if this > problem ever crops up again and stays for a week. > > This can happen to anyone due to any bug in appengine and I thought it was > good to give a heads up. If GAE causes a high number of instances to spin > up for no fault of yours, you would still end up paying the charges. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google App Engine" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/google-appengine/-/y-Kwfu1X98gJ. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine?hl=en.
