> " You probably can’t tell me how much electricity your home is using right now, and may only come within tens of dollars of accurately predicting your water bill. But neither of those bills are all that scary, because you assume there’s a limit to how much you could run them up in a single billing interval. "

I had a $600 surprise water bill. It was (partially) forgiven because the water department could drive to my house and see evidence of the leak next to my water meter. It did turn out to be on my side of the meter, so it is my responsibility.

If the water department had driven to my house and seen evidence of commercial agriculture (so to speak), then it would not have been forgiven.

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The parallel here is that the water department can't come into my house uninvited - the cloud provider SHOULD NOT have intimate access to the running code, but they are able to observe some patterns without 'breaking in'.

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Side note: the size of the bill and the amount of forgiveness was largely driven by waiving an 'excess usage' surcharge - similar to how you can get a discount for cloud service reservations.