> Computers do what you tell them to do. If you are totally clueless and don't bother to take even a few minutes to try to understand a system you are using, the results are going to be poor. Thinking any system can overcome total user ignorance is the thing here that isn't sane.
In theory I agree, but this website features something like "how I nearly bankrupted myself with an AWS bill" on the homepage every month or so. People are blissfully unaware about the extreme costs they're paying to the scaling cloud providers that they often don't even need in the first place.
While I don't think services should block extreme spend all together, a monthly/weekly/daily limit would go a long way to prevent these stories. Very few services that abstract away performance costs have a good way to limit expenses. I don't know if that's intentional or if these companies just don't care, but it's infuriating to me.
It's fine to expose the same tool to both someone who doesn't know the difference between indexes and foreign keys and someone who's been building cloud infra for many years, but as a company you should be prepared to respond to your customers' most likely mistakes. This specific case would probably be hard to detect automatically, but so many wasted CPU cycles, kilowatts and forgiven bills could be prevented if someone would just send an email saying "hey, you've been using more than 10x the normal capacity today, everything alright?"