Also not blaming him/them but isn't this an indicator of lack of cost control at research facilities? Surely someone should of costed this out before making it public?
Here in the UK running at 10k/day would of ruined a departments budget for an entire year!
Costing for cloud solutions is often not trivial, and a single overlooked parameter can do you in.
I at least blame Google partially for having quotas and spending limits set to unlimited by default.
Don't forget Amazon's incomprehensible billing practices for AWS. It seems to be designed to be impossible to figure out what you're going to spend ahead of time.
Amazon really seems to be doing this on purpose. Even tasks as simple as starting an EC2 instance require referencing multiple pages to find out how much this instance will cost you, while some other providers just show the predicted costs/month in the instance creation dialog.
in addition to how difficult costing cloud services is, what if you get it perfect but underestimate the success of your product?
great, "it would have been good except we were too popular" do you then cut off your popular product while it's gaining traction, and thus almost guarantee you kill it in its infancy?
Here in the UK running at 10k/day would of ruined a departments budget for an entire year!