Cost and billing
Cost authorisation
What is cost authorisation?
Cost authorisation estimates the maximum cost of a job and reserves it against a spend limit before any compute is leased. It converts a spend limit from an alarm that fires after the money is gone into a gate that runs before it is committed.
The distinction is the whole point. Post-hoc alerting tells you about an overrun once it has happened; a pre-flight reservation prevents the job from starting if it would exceed the limit.
Reservations must expire, or an abandoned job holds budget forever. A reservation that is never settled releases after a fixed window and returns the headroom.
Related terms
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