Google Cloud Billing Reimbursement via Donations?

[Hauke Mehrtens]

On 8/2/23 22:52, Paul Spooren wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> I’m a bit in a pickle. Some time ago I applied to multiple cloud providers to improve our CI and we received 10k$ from Azure (Buildbots), Google Cloud (CI Cache) and Digital Ocean (general Infra). It all went great and quiet so far, up until yesterday where Google booked 1.8k$ from my private credit card.
> 
> Turns out the CI cache worked excellent by greatly reducing job times, however also using 94TB of bandwidth per month. The bill thereby boils down to some 16$ for storage capacity and around 1.8k$ for bandwidth.
> 
> Asking both the billing team and the open source team from Google for further sponsoring and a refund, neither "can do anything”. Their funding got “significantly reduced” so no new credits will be available. I disabled all Google Cloud products used by OpenWrt.
> 
> A bit unfortunate that I didn’t keep closer track of the credit usage, to be fair I neither expected 94TB/m usage nor that price tag for it. Their support quote on that:
> 
>> Please keep in mind that they [credits] will expire in 12 months and there will be no notifications when credits are low, so you would have to manually check the remaining balance every once in a while.
> 
> I wonder if the project minds using some of our SFC donations to refund that bill. It’s not breaking my neck but blowing away nearly 2k$ for CI cache for an open source project I work for is a bit… much.
> 
> tl;dr: can we use OpenWrt donations to pay a big cloud bill?

Hi Paul,

Yes we should use the OpenWrt money for this.
Thanks for stopping this immediately when you saw this problem.
I think the cloud providers intentionally do not support features to 
block services when you run out of money.

I am surprised that we generated 94TB traffic. Was this only for the 
github actions in our account or for all github actions also the ones 
running in forks?

Hauke