MVPs and $100k AWS Bills: Reflections on our launch • Hacker News Board

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

#51

Post by mping » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 3:01 PM UTC

shiftpgdn wrote: post #50

bronco21016 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would cloud go away? If you’re a team of 3-4 people and have a startup idea what’s easier? Create an AWS account and smartly spin up required servers? Or find a location (rent$), get fiber($$) to that location($$), find hardware($$), install said hardware. Now you’re back to where you were with AWS. For larger already established businesses on prem is probably a setup you should explore but on day 0 of a new busi…

I can purchase and then colocate 2x Dell R640s (8c/16t, 64gb of ram, as much NVMe storage as I can stomach) with tier 1 bandwidth billed at the 95th percentile and 24/7 remote hands support for about $150/month. The purchase price on the Dells is about $3500/ea. Total first year cost on this setup: $8,800 Total three year cost on this setup: $12,400 2x m5d.4xlarge EC2 instances (this isn't counting ingress/egress rat…

I'm pretty sure colocation is cheaper if you know what you're doing (what to buy, where to colocate, what kind of bandwidth required, etc). I'm also pretty sure a good portion of cloud customers don't know or don't want to risk it.

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

#52

Post by blantonl » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 3:08 PM UTC

Spooky23 wrote: post #42

blantonl wrote: post #37

The architectural decision to deploy each customer on their own segmented components to make sure that "no one user’s data to mingle with another" seems to me like a solution in search of a problem. First, the deployment was on AWS (EC2 and RDS among other services) which was probably already co-mingled with other AWS customers. Second, when you are selling a SAAS offering, the assumption is already there that you'll…

It could make alot of sense for alot of government, healthcare and financial use cases.

I agree. In those cases, sell those customer separate products and expectations and price it accordingly.

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

#53

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 5:50 PM UTC

[deleted]

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

#54

Post by Havoc » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 6:08 PM UTC

Well glad they had the capacity to recover.

Even accounting for hindsight being 20/20...every customer gets their own VM is a rather ambitious approach to scaling.

Would love to know what made them shift to Azure. Especially while embracing linux at same time.

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

#55

Post by jcims » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 6:14 PM UTC

DVassallo wrote: post #49

> We quickly learned that everything in AWS has some kind of service limit Except S3. Unlimited objects, and unlimited Put and Get requests.

Just keep in mind if you're using SSE KMS to encrypt you are subject to limits of that service when using S3 (there are a few ways to mitigate this).

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

#56

Post by johnnymangos » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 6:42 PM UTC

DVassallo wrote: post #49

> We quickly learned that everything in AWS has some kind of service limit Except S3. Unlimited objects, and unlimited Put and Get requests.

Your comment is not true in all cases. S3 is limited to 5,000 get/put requests per prefix. So while it's possible to achieve what you've said, it's also possible to stumble upon this limit in a fashion similar to the original comment.

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

#57

Post by staticautomatic » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 7:31 PM UTC

ignoramous wrote: post #43

LeonM wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even without the free trial, how on earth can you burn $100 in cloud resources in a month if you plan to resell it for $10?

That's the lesson: The most obvious advice isn't obvious. If one goes through https://startupschool.org/library one realises how much of the advise ought to be common knowledge and common sense, but that's the thing, folks ignore it all the time . Another mistake, it was pointed out by Kevin Hale, iirc, this year at startupschool, that founders make is they think their pricing model (or their UX) is a key differentia…

What part of spending $100 to get $10 being a bad idea is not obvious?

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

#58

Post by dclusin » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 7:43 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #19

> 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 b…

It seems like napkin math could have alerted them to the potential worst case scenario costs. EC2 instance + db instance per customer alone made my jaw drop. Multiply this by 1,000, 10,000, 50,000 and costs are really regrettable.

Edit: I know most database applications like Postgres can handle multiple databases. Does RDS let you have more than 1 database per instance?

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

#59

Post by paulstovell » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 7:52 PM UTC

LeonM wrote: post #28

pjc50 wrote: post #19

> 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 b…

Even without the free trial, how on earth can you burn $100 in cloud resources in a month if you plan to resell it for $10?

The $10 was the starting price. It’s not uncommon for companies to have a cheaper “loss leader” tier.

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

#60

Post by paulstovell » Wed, Oct 09, 2019, 7:58 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #19

> 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 b…

The deployment itself worked flawlessly :-)