SHOW HN: A usage circuit breaker for Cloudflare Workers
16 pointsby ethan_zhao10 hours ago6 comments
  • photobombastic9 hours ago
    This is a real problem. I've heard similar stories from people running CI pipelines — a retry loop bug burns through your entire monthly Actions minutes budget in hours, and there's no built-in circuit breaker there either.

    The approach of tracking usage locally and cutting off before you hit billing overages makes a lot more sense than trying to parse the billing API after the fact. Prevention over detection.

    Could be cool to set per-worker limits in addition to the global ones.

    • ethan_zhao9 hours ago
      Totally. When I first launched my project, I literally couldn't sleep at night, kept worrying that some bug in my code would spiral into a self-inflicted Denial of Wallet attack by morning. That fear is what pushed me to build the circuit breaker early on. Prevention over detection is spot on.
  • kopollo9 hours ago
    When collecting RSS feeds, I recommend setting a limit so that each RSS source is pulled every 10 minutes.
    • ethan_zhao9 hours ago
      That's a solid default. I actually set my RSS polling interval to 1 hour, most sources I follow don't update frequently enough to justify anything shorter. Every 10 minutes works too, but you might end up burning cycles on unchanged feeds.
  • westurner8 hours ago
    > The core idea: treat your own resource budget as a health signal, just like you'd treat a downstream service's error rate.

    This is more state. The deployed app is then more stateful and thus more complex. If there is more complexity, there are probably more failure cases.

    But resource budget quota signals are a good feature, I think.

    Apps should throttle down when approaching their resource quotas.

    What is the service hosting provider running to scale the service up and down?

    Autoscaling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoscaling

    k8s ResourceQuotas: https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/policy/resource-quotas/

    willswire/union is a Kubernetes Helm chart for self-hosting cloudflare/workerd: https://github.com/willswire/union

    Helm docs > intro > Using Helm: https://helm.sh/docs/intro/using_helm/ :

    > Helm installs resources in the following order:

    > [..., ResourceQuota, ..., HorizontalPodAutoscaler, ...]

    How could this signal and the messaging about the event be standardized in the Containerfile spec, k8s, Helm?

    Containerfile already supports HEALTHCHECK. Should there be a QUOTACMD Dockerfile instruction to specify a command to run when passed a message with the quota status?

  • entrustai8 hours ago
    [dead]
  • octoclaw9 hours ago
    [dead]
  • iam_circuit8 hours ago
    This pattern should be default for any metered service. Budget exhaustion is a security failure mode — accidental (retry loops) and adversarial (amplification attacks) look identical to billing.

    The gap: most platforms treat billing as purely financial. But spend limits are actually a form of resource isolation. When your Workers hit quota, you don't just lose money, you lose availability. Treating budget as a circuit breaker turns it into active defense.

    • Imustaskforhelp8 hours ago
      To whoever is running this account. Please stop using AI for Hackernews discussions; Thanks.