As discussed with the BU throttling at soft limit is not adding any value for customers and actively complicates documentation and monitoring for customers.

A customer running up to the soft limit is unlikely to notice the throttling (unless they are monitoring their application very carefully), so isn't really an effective signal. Even if they did it is doubtful customers will notice producer throttling in time to act, a safety factor of 2 there would have been a little over 1 min of throttling before the hard limit, given the 30s storage check interval. Moving to a factor of 5 would give them 2m 30s or so to react.

The hard limit is what really protects the broker anyway, so we just simplify the documentation and monitoring story to the hard limit.

The important thing is that we encourage customers to monitor their storage using the metrics.