Does appengine apply discounted instance hours before disabling application for going over the daily maximum?

Question

AppEngine shut down my application for going over its daily usage quota. However, I believe I had plenty of discounted instance hours left and, if they had been applied, I would not have been over my daily quota.

I had to raise my quota to re-enable the application. The next day, when the bill was calculated, it was well under my old daily quota.

Has anyone else seen this? Is this how it is meant to work? Feels like a trick to just get us to keep upping the daily quota.

Thank you!

Answer 1

I have received a message from Google Cloud Support about this. Discounted instance hours are currently not applied before the daily quote is used to disable the app.

So, even if you commit to discounted instance hours, you have to set daily quote as if all hours are charged at full price, or your app will be disabled.

Google Cloud support writes:

our 'Daily budget' system doesn't take into account discounted instances hour rates in case you ran out of instance hours. It would attempt to plan for the worst case scenario of being charged at full price instance hours.

and, later:

It is, indeed a problem on our end ... we currently don't have a public tracking system in place for outstanding issues nor can I confirm an ETA on the resolution.

We are currently working on making changes in the billing system and your input will definitely have it's weight in the scale. Any new release or updates would be announced at our Google Platform official blog at http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com.