Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

alexolivier.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 397 posts

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

#141

Post by cobookman »

jskrablin wrote: post #47
moksly wrote: 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.

Set budget alerts. And check what's going on if they start going off. Or think again if you really need 'infinitely scalable bla blah' for personal project on a small budget.

aws lightsale and digital ocean are great alternatives for personal projects

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

#142

Post by alasdair_ »

I wont use this for the simple reason that I bought into the Google Appengine stack in the past and it really bit me for several reasons:

They force-upgraded the java version. The problem was their their own libraries didn’t work with the new version and we had to rewrite a ton of code.

It ended up being insanely expensive at scale.

We were totally locked-in to their system and the way it did things. This would be fine but they would also deprecate certain things we relied upon fairly regularly so there was regular churn to keep the system running.

Support was extremely weak for some parts of the system. Docs for java were outdated compared with the python docs.

Support (that we paid for) literally said to us “oh... you’re still using appengine?”

Finally, they can jack up the pricing at any time and there really isn’t anything you can do - you can’t switch to an alternative appengine provider.

Certain pages in the management console were completely broken due to a js error (on any browser). In order to Use them i had to manually patch the javascript. Six months after reporting it several times and it was still broken.

Oh, and when we got featured on a bunch of news sites, our “scalable” site hit the billing threshold and stopped working. No problem, just update the threshold, right? Except it takes twenty four hours (!) for the billing stats to actually update. So were were down on the one day that “unlimited scaling” actually mattered to us.

I’m never again choosing a single-vendor lock-in solution. Especially since it’s not limited to appengine - Google once raised the fees for the maps API from thousands a year to eight figures (seriously) a year with barely any notice.

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

#143

Post by libria »

tpetry wrote: post #83
gumby wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When will everyone understand that google cloud (money earning product) is different to all the other free products When Google demonstrates it. They've already discontinued various parts of their cloud product. True, they are unlikely to shut down gmail, search, or Android. On the other hand google's cloud is a money loser that has slipped to a distant #4 in the cloud rankings. But like many of Google's revenue-ge…

Do you have examples of discontinued Google Cloud Platform products?

https://cloud.google.com/prediction/

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

#144

Post by franciscop »

cheriot wrote: post #136
franciscop wrote: post #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…

From the article: > The service will create more and more instances of your application up to the limit you defined The Cloud Run docs confirm an instance maximum can be set and the price per instance can be less than $5/month.

Cost is not only based on the number of instances. From a quick search:

https://www.jhanley.com/google-cloud-run-pricing/

Understanding the cost of these services is not easy at all, especially for extreme cases/situations. And a calculator/estimator won't fix the problem. That is why I love the fixed $X/month where there's no room for surprises.

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

#145

Post by pcnix »

fideloper wrote: post #68

There must be added cost for a managed databases or similar, right? This sounds a lot like aws lambda (except nicer thanks to just running any container). In AWS’s case, you need to pay extra for RDS, redis, and any other persistence.

GCP has Cloud Functions as the serverless Google Cloud equivalent of Lambda, this is more like a Google version of Heroku.

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

#146

Post by alasdair_ »

spyspy wrote: post #72
moksly wrote: 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.

You can deploy with a —max-instances flag to prevent infinite scaling. This has been a feature since the Cloud Run beta and has been in GAE forever.

One issue in GAE is that it can take 24 hours to update the billing cap. So if you happen to get a ton of fantastic press coverage one day, your site will go down and there is literally nothing you can do to fix it.

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

#147

Post by sdan »

zwily wrote: post #130
fearface wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just make another Google Account just for this project? It’s what I do since year, basically for every customer I work, I create a new account and even share the credentials with the customer (if he wants it).

I’ve heard about Google correlating these accounts (through billing methods, contact methods, access patterns) and banning them together when one infringes on something. I’m not sure it’s the protection you think it is.

Yes they do. If you want to bypass these rules, just make a ton of accounts and wait for a couple months and the use those accounts with whatever credit card you have (keep in mind that you should get another card from your bank because google can tell when your card is a generated one like privacy.com)

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

#148

Post by jiofih »

duxup wrote: post #138

As a noob I have a question as to what advantages I have using docker compared to just a service like Heroku where I just push the application to them... and I don't bother with docker? To me with my limited understanding this seems like just another step. Now granted when it comes to work, I'm using docker with specifics that I know why I would want / can specify with docker ... but for personal projects this ever c…

The first obvious advantage is you can test your app locally in the exact same environment it will run, including any system dependencies and native modules. On any OS.

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

#149

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

jskrablin wrote: post #47
moksly wrote: 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.

Set budget alerts. And check what's going on if they start going off. Or think again if you really need 'infinitely scalable bla blah' for personal project on a small budget.

I do not want the failure mode to be the expensive case.

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

#150

Post by jjeaff »

This article fails to mention the issue of needing a database. It doesn't matter how seamlessly your application can scale if your data backend won't scale with it.

They mention Cloud SQL, which is of course instance based and would run into scaling issues if your app got suddenly hammered. Not to mention, the cost isn't $0 if your app gets 0 traffic, you are going to have to pay to keep that running around the clock.

I realize some applications are very heavy on the app side and light on needing to hit the DB, but in my experience, that isn't very common.

Post reply on HN