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Ask HN: Google Cloud limits you to 5 projects per billing account: why?

13 points by fomojola ↗ HN
Recently started doing work with Google Cloud Platform, and as much as I like it I'm having difficulty understanding WHY certain decisions got made. I have approximately 40 projects in the developer console, and I've set up a billing account and I have 5 projects attached to the billing account. I tried to attach a 6th project and I get this odd error message "You have reached the limit of projects on which you can enable billing. You can request an increase in your billing quota if you need to enable billing on additional projects.". I wouldn't actually care, except that you can't use certain things without a billing account attached to the project (like Cloud Storage). Unfortunately without Cloud Storage you can't use Cloud Functions (which is actually what I want to use). I've applied for the quota increase using the always helpful form, but I'm quite confused as to WHY you'd need this limitation? Why only 5 projects before you need to request a quota increase? I'm assuming there is some deeper data point driving that limitation: wondering what that might be. Right now it is just frustrating that they have introduced an organizational structure with no direct cost impact (as far as I can see) and then restricted its use.

Also hoping if there is someone from the Cloud team lurking here on HN (looking at you @boulos) could I get an assist?

8 comments

[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 36.0 ms ] thread
viraptor
Preventing stupid and costly mistakes. Same thing happens in AWS - you're limited to a relatively small number of resources until you ask for more. It's obvious for things that cost you money (stops you from reserving 1000 instances by accident), but could be applied for the same reason to all resources - you really want that many projects? Just ask for them.

Maybe you got an extra message like "watch out for Xxx as you create more projects" at the same time?

boulos
Fraud.

You get X amount of quota (YY cores or ZZ bytes of GCS) per project. So while we charge you ASAP these days, if you can create 1000 projects you can have 25000 cores even if your fake credit card will bounce or bounce after it charges more than say $10.

It totally sucks to have to deal with this, but it basically costs almost $0 to get a fake credit card or a stolen one that'll pass for at least a few bucks. So this means your getting started experience has friction due to the folks that would like to burn our precious cores for whatever the most valuable coin mining is.

bdcravens
I get the concurrent limit. My biggest frustration has always been the turnaround time to delete a project and free up a slot.
boulos
That's so you (or someone in your organization) have the human time to undelete. Perhaps an rm -f option would be handy, but like that flag risky ;).
fomojola
I eventually figured it out: once I created a separate billing project not attached to the free trial credit and attached it to my account I was able to proceed.

I mean: totally understand the fraud issue. Incredibly deceptive error message though. Just say what you need so I can be objective about the next step I should take: I already had multiple credit cards and bank accounts attached to the payment profile, but it took me nearly 2 hours to figure out that "you've reached your quota" means "you need to create a billing account that doesn't have free credit attached".

Free advice, so worth what you paid: your experience here would be WORLDS better with a simple "Upgrade your account" button that runs the $10 charge or whatever you've decided is required for forward progress.

That said: once I was past that gate, progress was swift, so there is that. Worth the money: you just need to make it straightforward to take my money.

boulos
I'll see if I can find the error string in the console about that (we should state the why). There are (used to be?) Upgrade your account things all over the place, but perhaps your setup was sufficiently mixed mode to have the limit yet not the prompt? Feel free to email me (contact in profile) your project number and I'll attach it to a bug.
samblr
I think I'd come across this problem a year ago. May be it was number of vms limit or something similar. Every time u deploy, a new vm is spun up. So try avoiding that. And temporary fix can be to override an existing app for 6th project. I'll try pasting a link later. Yes at least having an indicator of how much trial resources are available will help a developer instead of finding it out of blue.
rvnx
The quotas are here for 3 reasons: A) make sure that the hardware is available with the Google SREs (to make sure there are enough VMs, SSDs, etc...)

B) validation for fraud (billing fraud, or free coupons and do bitcoin mining with it) You could create 100 projects get 100*n quotas.

C) prevent human errors

Because of B), billing quota requests follow a standard quota request