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Deploy your side-projects at scale for basically nothing – Google Cloud Run

alexolivier.me

101–110 of 397 posts

Re: Deploy your side-projects at scale for basically nothing – Google Cloud Run

#101
post #17

The thing I really want out of these services is the ability to set a payment cap. It’s probably never going to be an issue, but I have anxiety, and I can’t sleep easily knowing that if I fuck up, if someone sinister abuses my application or whatever I may be stuck with a giant bill.

Then don’t get infinitely scaling services and get a Vultr instance, where your costs are fixed.

Re: Deploy your side-projects at scale for basically nothing – Google Cloud Run

#102
post #95
post #17

The thing I really want out of these services is the ability to set a payment cap. It’s probably never going to be an issue, but I have anxiety, and I can’t sleep easily knowing that if I fuck up, if someone sinister abuses my application or whatever I may be stuck with a giant bill.

It seems absolutely within amazon's technical ability to allow you to prepay for usage, and then evaluate your use on a per-hour basis. I have a side project that uses AWS at the moment, and while stuff like serverless RDS instances are really cool, it scares me that somehow amazon is going to have a bug which empties my checking account. I've read as much of the documentation as I can find and have done everything I…

Checkout privacy.com you can set merchant daily, monthly or yearly spending limits.

Re: Deploy your side-projects at scale for basically nothing – Google Cloud Run

#103
post #36

Another option is Google Cloud AppEngine. It’s a little more limited in terms of languages that are supported, but the free tier is generous enough that I have never paid anything to run backends for side projects.

For personal projects I think App Engine is superior due to the included services like Mail API and Memcache API.

There are also features like Firewall API that's lacking in Cloud Run right now.

One downside of App Engine (due to its 10+years of history) is that one GCP project can only have one App Engine app in a single region, and you can't change the region after it's created. You can have arbitrary number of Cloud Run service in one GCP project, each can be in different region.

It's also harder to take a Infrastructure-as-code approach on App Engine as there's no easy way to diff between the deployed version and the intent (in Cloud Run, you can use the container image hash for that purpose).

Disclaimer: SRE working on App Engine and Cloud Run.

Re: Deploy your side-projects at scale for basically nothing – Google Cloud Run

#104
post #17

The thing I really want out of these services is the ability to set a payment cap. It’s probably never going to be an issue, but I have anxiety, and I can’t sleep easily knowing that if I fuck up, if someone sinister abuses my application or whatever I may be stuck with a giant bill.

Here's a story about why you are right to be anxious: https://hackernoon.com/how-we-spent-30k-usd-in-firebase-in-l...

These stories are everywhere. A couple months ago, it hit an associate of mine pretty hard, he moved a small python monitoring and statistics application off a laptop in the office to AWS. A couple weeks later he came back and discovered that it had burned up a few thousand $'s in storage and transfer fees for what normally was a couple hundred MBs of data a day being passed around and a some database updates.

Since it wasn't really worth debugging what went "wrong" it got chalked up as a learning experience and moved back to the laptop where its happily running. If it dies/whatever its no big deal, just a git clone;./runme; and it rebuilds the whole database and creates another web facing interface.

The IaaS guys are masters of marketing. They have convinced everyone that their offerings are less expensive and more reliable, which repeatedly is proven to be false in all but the most dynamic of situations. In this cases its saving $7.99 a month over a unlimited site shared hosting godaddy/whatever plan. Just in case it might need to scale a lot, in which case your going to be paying hundreds if not thousands in surge pricing.

No thanks...

Re: Deploy your side-projects at scale for basically nothing – Google Cloud Run

#105
I have used it for work-related reasons and indeed the service is quite nice. But I don't use Google Cloud Run for personal projects for two reasons:

- No way of limiting the expenses AFAIK. I don't want the possibility of having a huge bill on my name that I cannot pay. This unfortunately applies to other clouds.

- The risk of being locked out. For many, many reasons (including the above), you can get locked out of the whole ecosystem. I depend on Google for both Gmail and Android, so being locked out would be a disaster. To use Google Cloud, I'd basically need to migrate out of Google in other places, which is a huge initial cost.

Both of those are basically risks. I'd much rather overpay $20-50/month than having a small risk of having to pay $100k or being locked out of Gmail/my phone. I cannot have a $100k bill to pay, it'd destroy everything I have.

Also I haven't needed it so far. I've had a Node.js project on the front page of HN, with 100k+ visits, and the Heroku hobby server used 30% of the CPU with peaks at 50%. Trying to do the software decently does pay off.

Re: Deploy your side-projects at scale for basically nothing – Google Cloud Run

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It goes up of course. Nothing's for free. Don't expect DigitalOcean level of pricing, the premise of cloud is on efficiency and scale, not necessarily being the cheapest raw computing provider when compared to traditional hosting. In other words it increases the elasticity of computation, but the price per unit of computation goes up. (Of course there are cost-savings like ops, security, uptime etc. But if you are ta…

> It goes up of course. Nothing's for free. Not sure why you write "of course" and "nothing's for free". If you use dedicated hosting with something like Hetzner, "suddenly hit a big traffic" doesn't automatically mean more costs for you. The website might get slower, or even crash, but your pricing will still be the same as it was before.

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Re: Deploy your side-projects at scale for basically nothing – Google Cloud Run

#107
Sounds quite similar to Azure Container Instances, except ACI seems to be cheaper (at a glance). ACI is also not HTTP-only like this seems to be, but you do need to combine it with a Function App (Azure's serverless offering) if you want to trigger containers using HTTP.

Re: Deploy your side-projects at scale for basically nothing – Google Cloud Run

#108
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a bug... that's a 'feature'. Interestingly, AWS will not cut you off for non-payment (we had an issue with finance and were 250k in the red by the time we got the first 'Is there any issues over there?' email)

This sounds like a short term 'thinking'. If there are a few stories on the internet (and there are some in this very thread) about developers getting burned by this 'feature', it would turn off a lot of potential users in the future. It would make sense to be transparent and give tools to strictly control usage/billing - both in terms of trust and money.

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Re: Deploy your side-projects at scale for basically nothing – Google Cloud Run

#109

Your liability is not capped anywhere. I better stick to 5$/mo DO for my side-projects.

It takes a lot of virality to go over $5/mo for a smaller-side project in Cloud Run. (essentially if you got the point where it would go over, the additional surplus traffic would be well worth it)

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Re: Deploy your side-projects at scale for basically nothing – Google Cloud Run

#110

I have used it for work-related reasons and indeed the service is quite nice. But I don't use Google Cloud Run for personal projects for two reasons: - No way of limiting the expenses AFAIK. I don't want the possibility of having a huge bill on my name that I cannot pay. This unfortunately applies to other clouds. - The risk of being locked out. For many, many reasons (including the above), you can get locked out of…

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