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DigitalOcean App Platform

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Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#121

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

pomatic wrote: post #110
WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what makes "the cloud" profitable. If your droplet isn't using all of it's resources (CPU, RAM, DISK), they are able to oversell their capacity.

To be clear, I had no deployed resources, but was still charged as if I had. As it turns out, it's impossible to cancel the "standing charge" without recourse to support. There's a difference between load balancing of shared resources and (what I believe must be) deliberately deceptive practices. A customer-centric company would send an email to notify you of this kind of over-charging. It's premeditated and dispicab…

I didn't say it wasn't a shitty outcome, but this is what people advocate for when there's a push "for the cloud" or "how aws is doing great things"

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#122

Post by rsanek »

throw49477721 wrote: post #108
user5994461 wrote: post #75

I am so glad to see this. I was looking to deploy an app and the choice is either Heroku or manage your own server which I don't want to do. Heroku gives instant deployment for the most common types of apps (python/java/ruby). It's PaaS done right, it's fantastic. You should really have a look if you're not aware of it, it's only $7 for a starter app. Problem is, scaling up is about $50 per gigabyte of memory which m…

How does Heroku and these app hosting services handle updates to the underlying OS and other dependencies? Do they only patch non-breaking updates? Or are you on their schedule to ensure your app will run on the latest version?

You are indeed "on their schedule" -- see eg https://devcenter.heroku.com/changelog-items/1603. But that's the trade-off you deal with, so that you don't have to manage all this stuff yourself.

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#123

Post by tidepod12 »

pomatic wrote: post #110
WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what makes "the cloud" profitable. If your droplet isn't using all of it's resources (CPU, RAM, DISK), they are able to oversell their capacity.

To be clear, I had no deployed resources, but was still charged as if I had. As it turns out, it's impossible to cancel the "standing charge" without recourse to support. There's a difference between load balancing of shared resources and (what I believe must be) deliberately deceptive practices. A customer-centric company would send an email to notify you of this kind of over-charging. It's premeditated and dispicab…

What you call "premeditated and despicable" is actually a huge value proposition for others. Whereas AWS/GCP have pricing structures based on usage and you never know until the end of the month how much you owe, DO instead has defined "you will pay $50/mo for this regardless of if you do or do not use it" and from what I've seen, many people really value and appreciate that, and specifically choose DO over AWS/GCP because of that.

The pricing model for App Platform seems antithesis to that, though, which is interesting. DO is becoming more like AWS/GCP with every feature release, which I don't necessarily find to be a good thing.

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#124

Post by user5994461 »

076ae80a-3c97-4 wrote: post #120
user5994461 wrote: post #75

I am so glad to see this. I was looking to deploy an app and the choice is either Heroku or manage your own server which I don't want to do. Heroku gives instant deployment for the most common types of apps (python/java/ruby). It's PaaS done right, it's fantastic. You should really have a look if you're not aware of it, it's only $7 for a starter app. Problem is, scaling up is about $50 per gigabyte of memory which m…

It's probably worth looking into the big cloud providers rather than the little guys. In Azure you can have an app service (a deployed app in any one of loads of languages without looking after the machine it sits on) with 1.75GB RAM for about $12 a month. Obviously your usage may vary and that will effect the price. But I get the feeling that the big players are cheaper than people think they are for small projects.

The big players have separate charges for bandwidth and disk and other hidden stuff. They are way more expensive than Digital Ocean / OVH all inclusive. Worse, the costs is unpredictable which makes them a no go for a side project, I can't risk accidentally getting a $1000 bill.

As a real world example, I run a personal blog. If it were running on S3, my personal finance would have been obliterated when it got featured on HN and served 1+ TB of traffic.

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#125

Post by tupputuppu »

rgbrenner wrote: post #77
p410n3 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What good are alerts when I sleep? I usually don't even check my personal mail until I'm done at work. There's a lot that can happen in 16h

On AWS I tie high billing threshold alerts with PagerDuty so it wakes me up at night.

Oh man, what a user friendly solution

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#126

Post by tebbers »

colinclerk wrote: post #71

We've been happy https://render.com customers for over a year now and on the surface this looks very similar. I'm glad to see another company take a stab at iterating on Heroku while keeping ops burden low. I'm interested to know - what's the sales pitch for DO over Render? I'm noticing some pricing differences but at first glance it seems they tip Render's direction. I'm also noticing Render is a bit further along (…

Thanks for mentioning Render, I had not heard of them. I've been evaluating options over the last few months as we may outgrow Dokku hosted on DigitalOcean soon (both of which have been very reliable and a delight to work with). Render looks excellent.

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#127

Post by pomatic »

tidepod12 wrote: post #123
pomatic wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, I had no deployed resources, but was still charged as if I had. As it turns out, it's impossible to cancel the "standing charge" without recourse to support. There's a difference between load balancing of shared resources and (what I believe must be) deliberately deceptive practices. A customer-centric company would send an email to notify you of this kind of over-charging. It's premeditated and dispicab…

What you call "premeditated and despicable" is actually a huge value proposition for others. Whereas AWS/GCP have pricing structures based on usage and you never know until the end of the month how much you owe, DO instead has defined "you will pay $50/mo for this regardless of if you do or do not use it" and from what I've seen, many people really value and appreciate that, and specifically choose DO over AWS/GCP be…

The problem I have is not with the model, but with the fact it is so difficult to cancel the standing charge. If it could be done from the web UI, and/or there was an interlinked pop-up when zero droplets are deployed, fine.

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#128

Post by pomatic »

ohgodplsno wrote: post #117
pomatic wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is laughable - billing is logically separated from droplet use, so unlike other providers DO charges for the potential to use a capability, rather than actual use, regardless of whether it is consumed. I got stung badly by this - charged for X droplets capability when zero droplets capability was being used for several months. Explained the misunderstanding to DO, got no sympathy & no refund. Won't touch them ag…

You bought access to X servers knowingly (because you can't do that by accident), let them sit here knowingly, then got billed the exact number that was listed, but somehow that's DigitalOcean's fault ?

> let them sit here knowingly

Nothing was deployed. Zip, zero, zilch resources were used month-on-month. My fault, yes, but naively I assumed if this was the case, billing would automatically drop to zero.

Whilst I bought access to X servers but had no way to remove the charge associated with that without contacting customer services when I decided X=0, permanently.

I mean, really? I have no problem with PAYG or PAYG to a capped amount, but PAYG for a fixed amount regardless of whether or not the resources are actually deployed is disingenuous at best.

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#129

Post by mrweasel »

jaywalk wrote: post #78
mrweasel wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had no idea that was the point of beanstalk. Now I know what I’m doing this evening.

Oh, the name Elastic Beanstalk didn't make it obvious??? /s

Weirdly enough no, and Amazon is normally so good and consistant in their naming of products.

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#130

Post by tidepod12 »

tupputuppu wrote: post #111
tidepod12 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS has a PaaS: Elastic Beanstalk. Though I would forgive you for forgetting about EB since it sometimes feels like AWS's neglected step child.

I'm not an AWS expert by no means, but from what I've played around with it it's miles away from something like Heroku where you just have a two-line config file in your Github repo, you point Heroku to the repo and say "deploy whenever there's a commit that passed the CI/CD pipeline). Or from this here DO innovation either.

Yes, this is what I was referring to when I said EB sometimes seems like a neglected stepchild of AWS.

AWS in general follows a paradigm where the target market is generally large, huge enterprises with niche use cases and large IT organizations that don't mind (and often require) taking fine-grained control of things like setting up CI/CD pipelines, deployment configurations, etc. These things are all possible and powerful on AWS but they mostly require self-configuration, which is sort of the opposite of what Heroku/DO App Platform are trying to be.

Beanstalk is in a weird place because it still follows that AWS paradigm of "we want to expose all of these fine-grained controls to the power users at large enterprises" while also still attempting to make it easier for the average developer. The end result is that Beanstalk gets stuck somewhere in the middle.

Beanstalk is a very capable and powerful service, and you certainly can set up a CI/CD pipeline in the way you've described, but you have to set it up yourself using AWS CodePipeline or by using the beanstalk CLI... which is certainly not as developer friendly as something like Heroku, especially if it's just a hobby app that you're toying with on the weekends.

And to muddy the waters a bit more, AWS also has Amplify, which actually does have one-click-setup for a GitHub linked CI/CD pipeline, but AFAIK it's mostly meant for static websites or for mobile apps, so it isn't exactly the same target use cases as Beanstalk.

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