I think they already tried rewriting billing with AI. Very smartly they only tried rewriting the estimator first. This post is about the outcome of it.
Weekend is too long bro! With AI they can weite 50 implementations in a single prompt. They clearly are using tooo many humans and that's why they're lagging
Storage-based billing is huge, unless you mean something other than “places that make you pay for storage separately”.
Also many places I’ve worked, storage is a huge part of the spend but that depends a lot on what you do. e-commerce doesn’t use a ton of it, but if you handle user-generated content or do any kind of training (LLM, computer vision, etc) then you can very much end up in a place where storage becomes a top line number for infra spend.
GitHub pre-Copilot was probably like that. They host a shitload of data, most of which is just at rest the majority of the time. Storage and networking are probably the majority of their infra costs.
Oh, I also don’t think I’ve ever seen that but I’m not surprised. Even if you could steal a huge amount of storage, filling it with data would take ages and the cat and mouse game of moving the data as hacks get uncovered would be untenable.
I have seen things get hacked for bandwidth, back in the days before you could rent a gbps uplink from the cloud for $0.12. Some scene release groups would hack into universities or companies to do the initial seeding over their super fast links. It used storage, but that wasn’t really the goal.
Like kgwgk already said - people post the occasional horror story where they run up a huge AWS bill, either due to a run-away process or getting hacked. It seems to almost always be about Compute, not Storage.
> and they also imply deleting all your data so that you don't pay for storage.
Not necessarily. They could imply that your storage becomes inaccessible immediately, but only gets deleted after some time period (say, 1 month). What spending limits do depends on the implementation.
How would that work? If you only pay for one day, your access (read and write) gets cut off after the first month. Then if you don't pay the bill for the entire grace period, your data gets deleted.
Not only can you not set limits, even the alarms are not real time. So it is entirely possible to get on the hook for terrifying amounts of money and not know until it's all too late.
