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MVPs and $100k AWS Bills: Reflections on our launch

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Re: MVPs and $100k AWS Bills: Reflections on our launch

#11

Post by teddyuk »

swiley wrote: post #4
teddyuk wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the "sql-as-document-store" post, I re-read it every now and then to realise how actually terrible it is: "For a many-to-many, we do something a bit naughty: we store the values with | characters between each value:" Not naughty, stupid.

Why would you bother with a relational database at that point? That sounds like it’s not normalized. I haven’t read the post... maybe I’m missing something.

because they didn't know what they were doing - I can say this as this is what the blog shows, they don't understand databases and customers (including me) have suffered this

Re: MVPs and $100k AWS Bills: Reflections on our launch

#12

Post by teddyuk »

scarface74 wrote: post #9

The lesson to be learned here, and the one they admittedly already knew in advance, is if you do a lift and shift to AWS without changing your processes to be cloud native, you will always spend more. Unfortunately, I’ve met way too many old school netops guys who got one AWS certification and all they knew was how to log into the web console and duplicate their colo infrastructure, charge their client a lot of money…

Going to the cloud won't save you money.

Going to the cloud lets you scale beyond your own data centre

Going to the cloud can be cheaper if you use the elasticity and make good use of PaaS services (servless,paas, etc)

Re: MVPs and $100k AWS Bills: Reflections on our launch

#13

Post by echelon »

I have a streaming multimedia app that I want to launch. It ingests from the client, does some transformations, then sends it back to them (or to other parties) in realtime. It's pretty novel though - Snapchat adjacent.

I can't do it clientside. Nature of the problem.

I'm writing it in Rust, so it's relatively fast. But throwing thousands of people at it will still require extreme scale. I'm going to use K8S horizontal autoscaling. This will be obscenely expensive.

I'm not sure I can afford this. But I think a month of successful demonstration will get me funded (or bought out). So in theory my costs could wind up getting paid. Maybe.

Do I risk launching this and potentially having $100k multiples of AWS bills? I can't afford that. I don't want to deplete my life savings or potentially go bankrupt.

Could I put it on a corporate card as an LLC and do my best to make it work? Then fold without harm or fowl if it doesn't? Is that unethical? Could I get sued?

All that said, I'm almost certain that a successful demo at scale with the Internet thrown at it will get me money. It's a really cool and novel product. People will be talking about it.

What should I do? Advice will be very appreciated.

Re: MVPs and $100k AWS Bills: Reflections on our launch

#16

Post by teddyuk »

echelon wrote: post #13

I have a streaming multimedia app that I want to launch. It ingests from the client, does some transformations, then sends it back to them (or to other parties) in realtime. It's pretty novel though - Snapchat adjacent. I can't do it clientside. Nature of the problem. I'm writing it in Rust, so it's relatively fast. But throwing thousands of people at it will still require extreme scale. I'm going to use K8S horizont…

onboard customers slowly and charge them - as you scale, make sure your charging as well and get paid.

you don't need to go from 0 - 100k a month in a single month, octopus could because they have backing.

Re: MVPs and $100k AWS Bills: Reflections on our launch

#17

Post by scarface74 »

teddyuk wrote: post #12
scarface74 wrote: post #9

The lesson to be learned here, and the one they admittedly already knew in advance, is if you do a lift and shift to AWS without changing your processes to be cloud native, you will always spend more. Unfortunately, I’ve met way too many old school netops guys who got one AWS certification and all they knew was how to log into the web console and duplicate their colo infrastructure, charge their client a lot of money…

Going to the cloud won't save you money. Going to the cloud lets you scale beyond your own data centre Going to the cloud can be cheaper if you use the elasticity and make good use of PaaS services (servless,paas, etc)

I agree, but it also lets you automate and probably lets you get rid of or not hire as many infrastructure people between automation and outsourcing the simple stuff to a managed service provider.

Re: MVPs and $100k AWS Bills: Reflections on our launch

#18

Post by teddyuk »

dragonwriter wrote: post #10
swiley wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you bother with a relational database at that point? That sounds like it’s not normalized. I haven’t read the post... maybe I’m missing something.

> Why would you bother with a relational database at that point? That sounds like it’s not normalized. It's non-1NF, though they sometimes (based on expected cardinality) normalize that aspect via a trigger, using the application-accessed table as, in effect, something of a write-through denormalized materialized view. It's not an entirely unreasonablev way to use an RDBMS in and of itself.

except they used sql server and sql server performance with this is awful, oracle would have been able to handle it much better

Re: MVPs and $100k AWS Bills: Reflections on our launch

#19

Post by pjc50 »

> Octopus Cloud customers could start a free 30-day trial, which meant that those hundreds of trial signups per month, each of which cost us $100 to host, quickly added up.

> We also didn’t have our pricing quite right. We initially launched Octopus Cloud at $10/month, with a different pricing model from the one we currently use. Unfortunately, this was one of the most painful lessons we learned because the deficit between what we were charging and spending was magnified by the sheer number of people using Octopus Cloud; continued growth would further amplify the problem.

"Every person who fills in a web form gets to burn a $100 bill of ours" is the real disaster here.

I know it's trendy to think that software isn't like regular business, and you can lose money but make it up on volume, but going to a cloud vendor gives you a real cost of goods sold, and that needs to be accounted for.

(also, the irony of a company whose product appears to be about cloud deployment having a disaster by deploying to the cloud should not be lost on us)

Re: MVPs and $100k AWS Bills: Reflections on our launch

#20

Post by jermaustin1 »

teddyuk wrote: post #16
echelon wrote: post #13

I have a streaming multimedia app that I want to launch. It ingests from the client, does some transformations, then sends it back to them (or to other parties) in realtime. It's pretty novel though - Snapchat adjacent. I can't do it clientside. Nature of the problem. I'm writing it in Rust, so it's relatively fast. But throwing thousands of people at it will still require extreme scale. I'm going to use K8S horizont…

onboard customers slowly and charge them - as you scale, make sure your charging as well and get paid. you don't need to go from 0 - 100k a month in a single month, octopus could because they have backing.

octopus is a bootstrapped company
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