Hacker News Reader

Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

> You can find cool technical problems anywhere as long as you are willing to take the path less traveled.

After doing that a few times, I'm no longer sure if the reward of tackling cool problems to create more robust, better, faster components is worth the stress of missing deadlines.

Looking back on what value of better work materializes and what is, per YAGNI, usually wasted, I just had a thought: perhaps the right way is to take the easy/dumb way and focus all available time/effort to optimize it for performance - instead of abstraction and extensibility. Because in my experience, nobody ever extends the code the way you envisioned - if they do it at all, they do it by first refactoring it to suit their own idea. And, nobody ever goes back to fix performance. Therefore, making things abstract and extensible is mostly a wasted work - but making things fast pays back for as long as the code is in use.

View on HN

I am doing this for a particular purpose, though, that no billing system I have seen has. I hate metered API billing, and I don't want to use it. In particular, I don't want a customer running up a $10,000 bill and calling me for a refund. It probably will cost me O($1,000) to give them a refund, between the processing fees and the lost compute, and I will be out that money. Most companies that would ask for a refund also won't pay the bill when it arrives (which is, I think, why AWS is so liberal with refunds).

Instead, I want to do credit-based billing: you buy credits, and when you get to 0 credits, you are cut off (with an auto-refill option for the "metered billing experience," but with strict spending limits). This is, in my opinion, a much better UX than metered billing. From a distributed systems perspective, it's isometric to "metered billing with a hard spending cap" which may be the ultimate version.

The problem with credit-based billing (and why nobody does it) is that if you have a service in multiple datacenters, you have to consistently update a database to make sure that you don't drop below 0 credits, and that is very slow. However, by fiddling with the CAP theorem the way CockroachDB/Spanner do, I think we can do credit-based billing and make it feel like the AP system that metered billing is, and behave like a CP system only when we absolutely need to.

Also, this is basically all enabled by the fact that AWS has a precise time service.

In theory, version 1 of the API will be only in one region, version 2 will have active/passive redundancy, and around version 3 or 4 I want to switch to active/active in several DCs to give low latency and high reliability.

> I hate metered API billing, and I don't want to use it.

> Instead, I want to do credit-based billing: you buy credits, and when you get to 0 credits, you are cut off (with an auto-refill option for the "metered billing experience," but with strict spending limits). This is, in my opinion, a much better UX than metered billing.

How do your customers feel about that? Have you researched if your customers are comfortable spending their money upfront to buy credits they might only use much later (if ever)? For small amounts of money that might not be a big deal, but if we're talking about thousands of dollars that might look different.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com