A host of cloud services are missing the core functionality needed to build businesses on top of the services. Powerful services on mature platforms like Google Vision, etc., have a common set of deficiencies—they do not allow clients to send information about preferred latency and throughput (for a price), and they do not allow clients to programmatically define SLAs (again, for a price). (If you read the documents of Google Vision, there is no mention of how quickly the API will return the answer for a document of a particular size.) One price for ~all requesters is the norm. Not only that, in the era of ‘endless scalable compute,’ throttling is ubiquitous.
There are two separate ideas here. The first is about how to solve one-off needs around throughput and latency. For a range of services, we can easily provide a few options that price in bandwidth and server costs. For a certain volume of requests, the services may require that the customer send a request outlining the need with enough lead time to boot new servers. The second idea is about programmatically signing SLAs. Rather than asking customers to go back and forth with Sales around custom pricing for custom needs, providing a few options for a set of standard use cases may be more expedient.
Some low-level services like s3 work almost like that today. But the move to abstracting out this paradigm to higher-level services has largely not begun. I believe it is time.