This was the key sentence, I think. This type of problem actually shows up in other domains as well, queueing theory comes immediately to mind. Even the halting problem is only a problem with infinite tape, and becomes easier with (known?) limited resources.
When you have some parameter that is unbounded you need to add extra checks to bound them yourself to some sane value. You are right, in that the parent failed to monitor some infrastructure, but if they were in their own datacenter, once they filled their NAS, I’m positive someone would have noticed, if only because other checks, like diskspace are less likely to be forgotten.
Also, getting a huge surprise bill is a downside of any option, and the risk needs to be factored into the cost. I’m constantly paranoid when working in a cloud environment, even doing something as trivial as a directory listing from the command line on S3 costs money. I had a back and forths with AWS support just to be clear what the order of magnitude of the bill would be for a simple cleanup action since there were 2 documented ways to do what I needed, and one appeared to be easier, yet significantly more expensive.
This was the key sentence, I think. This type of problem actually shows up in other domains as well, queueing theory comes immediately to mind. Even the halting problem is only a problem with infinite tape, and becomes easier with (known?) limited resources.
When you have some parameter that is unbounded you need to add extra checks to bound them yourself to some sane value. You are right, in that the parent failed to monitor some infrastructure, but if they were in their own datacenter, once they filled their NAS, I’m positive someone would have noticed, if only because other checks, like diskspace are less likely to be forgotten.
Also, getting a huge surprise bill is a downside of any option, and the risk needs to be factored into the cost. I’m constantly paranoid when working in a cloud environment, even doing something as trivial as a directory listing from the command line on S3 costs money. I had a back and forths with AWS support just to be clear what the order of magnitude of the bill would be for a simple cleanup action since there were 2 documented ways to do what I needed, and one appeared to be easier, yet significantly more expensive.