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How not to get a $30k bill from Firebase
71–80 of 114 posts
Re: How not to get a $30k bill from Firebase
#72That's why I don't use cloud offerings. Their pricing models are designed to trap someone with a exorbitant bill and you don't have control over it. For example let's say you put an image on a CDN and someone who doesn't like you runs AB for a couple of days making billions of requests to bankrupt you or someone finds a page that runs costly queries and sets up curl against it. No thanks.
I think this is actually an admirable example of why Firebase is a fantastic option for a startup. This company had made no optimisations for this and would have lost a rare opportunity for virality.
Would you pay 30k$ for 2million people to look at and try your site? I would for any business I was running. If your servers were on fire at the start of that, would you pay 30k to keep your servers up?
Re: How not to get a $30k bill from Firebase
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amazon provides Billing Alarms for monitoring charges, which is very useful for anticipating unplanned cost surges: - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitori...
Alarms are like a garage leaving you a voicemail message before doing $25k of repairs on your car. It’s ridiculous that I can’t set a hard cap on my spending.
I guess you could have the SNS topic invoke a lambda that shuts down the specific service if you wanted that but I agree a budgets feature would be nice, especially when provisioning test accounts for developers.
Re: How not to get a $30k bill from Firebase
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
You see this is too complicated and "If you do it right" imply you can get it wrong and go bankrupt. I prefer to use dedicated server with dedicated bandwidth and Kubernetes on top of that. This makes me sleep comfortably at night. I tried the cloud and this was just too much anxiety for me to handle.
Yes, just like driving, if you doing it wrong you got to the hospital or die, if you doing it the right way you get from A to B. Personal responsibility does not go away because you are using the cloud.
I find this example ironic. Car accidents got the term "accident" for a reason. There are many accidents where the person in question thought they were doing it right only to miss something and end up in the hospital e.g tire low on air, some engine part failing, brake failed in unexpected weather conditions etc. It's similar to the cloud in that respect. You think you got it right only to have some unexpected spike in traffic or some other event trigger weaknesses in the setup and end up costing you
Re: How not to get a $30k bill from Firebase
#75I have to mention this every time I see it... The crowdfunding campaign mentioned in this article took place in "Colombia" not "Columbia." There is no country by the name of "Columbia." This problem is so aggravating to Colombians they even sell t-shirts in their airports that say "IT'S COLOMBIA NOT COLUMBIA"
Re: How not to get a $30k bill from Firebase
#76I really wish cloud providers would allow users to set a hard budget that just stops the service if you exceed a threshold. I got a surprise bill from AWS this month (fortunately orders of magnitude less than this, but still ~15x my usual) and am thinking of moving from Lambda to a VPS just so the possibility of this doesn't keep me up at night.
How did you manage to increase your bill 15x in Lambda?
Re: How not to get a $30k bill from Firebase
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amazon provides Billing Alarms for monitoring charges, which is very useful for anticipating unplanned cost surges: - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitori...
Alarms are like a garage leaving you a voicemail message before doing $25k of repairs on your car. It’s ridiculous that I can’t set a hard cap on my spending.
On the flip side I would never want my real business to shut off. Hobby project yes! Real business no,
Re: How not to get a $30k bill from Firebase
#78I really wish cloud providers would allow users to set a hard budget that just stops the service if you exceed a threshold. I got a surprise bill from AWS this month (fortunately orders of magnitude less than this, but still ~15x my usual) and am thinking of moving from Lambda to a VPS just so the possibility of this doesn't keep me up at night.
A few years ago I got a ~$3500 Amazon bill when someone broke into my account (through keys I'd inadvertently added to GitHub)[1].
I had no expectation of that money being waived, but Amazon did anyway.
Since then I've had billing alerts turned on at about the $150 mark (which is about double what my personal monthly Amazon bill is).
Re: How not to get a $30k bill from Firebase
#79Well, simply put: don't use Firebase.
I know I've seen at least 4 articles about 'OMG Surprise horrific billing" with them. And to be quite frank, you can buy a EC2 instance, throw Postgres on it, and have a stable bill (Except for bandwidth costs, but that's trivial... usually).
I'm sure Firebase has good features, but this surprise billing is terrifying. They can't even offer a warning "10 min average indicates a bill roughly XX,000$/mo". I could not suggest it in good faith for anything, especially since it doesn't have a hard cutoff.
Re: How not to get a $30k bill from Firebase
#80I really wish cloud providers would allow users to set a hard budget that just stops the service if you exceed a threshold. I got a surprise bill from AWS this month (fortunately orders of magnitude less than this, but still ~15x my usual) and am thinking of moving from Lambda to a VPS just so the possibility of this doesn't keep me up at night.
Microsoft Azure has such a feature (although not for Enterprise users, which is evil), I´m surprised that AWS doesn´t.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/legal/offer-detail...