Why?

>- VMs deleted, along with all the files on them

VMs shut down, deleted after a specified time period (7 days, whatever, the exact time period doesn't matter)

>- S3 buckets emptied

S3 buckets no longer accessible, emptied after a specified time period

>- DNS queries no longer getting answered

Yep, fine

>- Databases dropped, backups deleted

Database access revoked, backup access revoked, deleted after a specified time period.

There is no reason this has to be an immediate deletion. Heck, even if you request they delete something they probably don't do it immediately and just mark it "deleted" until it's cleaned up after time.

If the only choices are "my data gets deleted", or "$1,000 dollar bill", I think most students would choose data deleted.

And the whole "we are nice, we will waive bills for beginners who make mistakes" is in my experience, as a computing professor who has had multiple students hit this, not true. They seem to do waive fairly randomly to my eye, about a third of the time.

> For a professional account this is insane.

At $work there are plenty accounts where this would be acceptable. Annoying perhaps, but nothing that couldn't be recovered in a day would be lost. Reliable cost caps would be especially useful when running stuff with admin permissions and the dependencies don't have airtight supply chain security.

Yes, and I want all of this to happen automatically.

Last time, I had to spent a few hours deleting all the resources one by one, and then double check to be sure nothing was missing.

I did call it didn't I?

None of those things need to happen. (Unless you get billed by the individual DNS query?) The cost of storing things that already exist is known perfectly in advance. It is trivial to include the cost of "maintain everything until the end of the month" in your estimate of how much the customer has already spent. Then, when the spending halt occurs, nothing needs to be deleted because that was already accounted for.

also the free tier is generous because they want attract potential customer, if that offering is "too much burden" then they would axe it

they probably think that 1 year service that you can use rarely is too good

> notoriously complex pricing structure

You mean AWS?

(an AWS bill has about 10 pages of items you get charged for, with only 3 line items explained what they are, and even then, not why you get charged. GCP is better, but not by much (let's call it about 4 pages), and Azure is again better, but also not really (2 pages). AND they're all at least 10x as expensive as colo or dedicated hosting. Yes, 10x. People will deny that, and then you look at charges for data traffic, and conclude that if you use a lot of data traffic, it'll quickly start being more than 10x more expensive. And even cheap dedicated is only cheaper than a box in the corner of your closet for 6 months, maybe a year)

Oracle clouds free offerings are very generous. But then your using Oracle.

is the GCP free tier in the room with us now?

in all seriousness, would love a link.