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

DigitalOcean App Platform

pages.news.digitalocean.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 357 posts

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#341

Post by names_are_hard »

user5994461 wrote: post #124
076ae80a-3c97-4 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 featur…

I'm currently on AWS for my site and in the process of researching alternatives. I share your concern of something going wrong and being stuck with a huge bill. Someone pointed out that 1TB of outgoing traffic from Amazon EC2 would cost $90. I'm fortunate enough that that won't obliterate me, but I won't be happy if that happens. I'd rather my blog get hugged to death. Going viral isn't worth $90 to me.

But I don't think DO really solves this problem either. They say they have spending caps in some of their marketing materials, but the finer print says that overage billing is $0.01/GB. Now that's a whole lot better than Amazon's $0.09/GB, but it's not a cap.

DO can say they have "predictable pricing" because in the vast majority of the cases the "free allotment" that comes with your droplet is enough, so you never see a bandwidth charge, you pay the cost of your droplet and you're done. So yes, it's more predictable because Amazon would charge you $5.23 one month, $4.87 another month, and DO charges you $5 every month.

But I'm not worried about the 99% case, I'm worried about the extreme scenario where I somehow go viral or get DOSed. And both options leave me exposed.

That's not to say DO isn't a better deal for the hobbyist than AWS. The equivalent of DO's $5 droplet will run you much more on AWS, especially if you actually use the bandwidth they're allotting you. And the big 3 do a lot of nickel-and-diming, which is a nuisance compared to the simpler pricing model of the smaller providers.

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#342

Post by names_are_hard »

sneak wrote: post #303
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…

You shouldn’t trust Digital Ocean, either. They’ve a history of being shady liars about platform security. https://github.com/fog/fog/issues/2525 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6983097

I read that thread, it's quite concerning. Now I'm wondering how to determine if other providers are doing the same thing. I suppose I can test on a new instance, but that can only tell me definitively if they are doing it, not if they're not.

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#343

Post by names_are_hard »

xfalcox wrote: post #115

I really like this, but we need lower plans for smaller managed databases. A very small app composed of: - App Platform using 2 containers - $12 x 2 = $24 (not sure, price is weird) - PostgreSQL - $15 - Redis - $15 - Object Storage - $5 At ~$60 it becomes a bit too expensive.

Agreed. For me PaaS seems nice in theory until I start adding up the costs. For something that would generate revenue I'd go PaaS instead of playing sysadmin. But for my hobbies it's not worth it. I want a tiny postgres db, a tiny redis instance, a tiny bit of object storage...basically a tiny bit of everything. Maybe I'm not a good customer, I can accept that. I'm just happy it's possible to pay $5 and get a VM with 512 MB ram and 25GB of SSD storage, that would have been unthinkable $15 years ago. I have to manage everything on my own but I can run a few apps on that one VM.

To steal an old saying, VMs are cheap if your time is worth nothing. My time on weekends is worth nothing. Shrug.

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#344

Post by names_are_hard »

phildougherty wrote: post #19
onion2k wrote: post #16

Like all DigitalOcean products, the App Platform provides predictable, easy-to-understand pricing that allows you to control costs to prevent surprise bills. I can't see any features listed that enable me to control costs to prevent surprise bills. If a site got submitted to HN and hugged to not-to-death-because-it-autoscales then I'd wake up to a bunch of alerts and massive outbound bandwidth bill. I don't want that…

Thanks for the feedback! Autoscaling is not yet supported on the platform (but is coming soon). Before autoscaling lands as a feature, insights based alerting will also land. You'll be able to setup alerts for scaling events, bandwidth, cpu, memory, and more that can be sent via email or slack.

I've said this elsewhere in this thread, but there's a difference between predictable pricing and controlling runaway costs.

Predictable pricing means that each month my bill is the same: I'm on a $15 plan, I pay $15 a month. No nickel-and-diming, no hidden fees, life is simple. This is a good thing.

Controlling costs means that no matter what happens, my costs will not exceed $x/month. Service might degrade if necessary, but I will not pay for anything above some upper limit.

Seems that DO has the former but not the latter, because if things get out of hand (caused by an attack, a bug in my code, going viral) the customer can be stuck with a bill. Alerts do not alleviate this risk. Pricing that is generally predictable does not alleviate this risk. Only a hard cap does. I want a plan that says "you have 250 GB of traffic, after which requests will fail and you'll get an email". You can make it nicer by sending me a warning email at 200GB so that I have time to upgrade my plan if I want.

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#345

Post by NOGDP »

names_are_hard wrote: post #339
NOGDP wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The digital ocean volume pricing of $1/10GB per month seems very steep... I can literally buy fresh SSDs every month for that money. The container pricing is reasonable though.

This is the approximately going rate for all the major cloud providers (links [0]). Sure, you could buy your own SSDs, but how are you going to connect them to the VMs? I suppose this might be where their profit is, especially because these are logical volumes anyway. But it's not like you can just go out and beat this price at home with minimal effort. [0] Amazon ($0.1/GB): https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/pricing/ Azure…

> But it's not like you can just go out and beat this price at home with minimal effort.

That's exactly what I did. Taking the cost of my time for setting everything up and maintaining it, I estimate the net cost is about 1/10th of what it would be in the cloud.

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#346

Post by stickfigure »

bastawhiz wrote: post #325
ypeter wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And before this you could implement Cloud KMS in your app to decrypt the encrypted secrets you can store in your repo.

This still seems ridiculous. Why did I need to keep secrets in my repo to begin with? GAE, as far as I can tell, has been the only major PaaS that hasn't offered a solution for this. It's so easy to get wrong...it contradicts one of the biggest rules of version control: keep your secrets out of your repo.

There are a million ways to do it that don't require Google? Your CI system builds the production image, it can get secrets from anywhere.

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#347

Post by manigandham »

imtringued wrote: post #307
manigandham wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard spend limits are not an easy problem with cloud. There are too many things that incur costs. Everytime this comes up, I ask the same question: what do you expect to happen when the quota is hit? Shutdown your servers? Wipe your SSDs and storage buckets? Remove your DNS records? Should it be permanent? If not then they're just subsidizing the costs. If it's soft-limit then its just a warning, and if you just want…

>Shutdown your servers? Wipe your SSDs and storage buckets? Remove your DNS records? Should it be permanent? If not then they're just subsidizing the costs. If it's soft-limit then its just a warning, and if you just want a warning then billing alarms already exist in every cloud. You know. When I hit the storage limit of my SSD it doesn't wipe my data. It just ceases to store more data. When I rent a server for a fi…

The vast majority of overages are due to user error. These errors would just be shifted to include quota mistakes, which can incur data or service loss. Usage limits might be softer than monetary limits which are bounded by the time dimension, but can still cause problems since they do not discriminate between good vs bad traffic.

Before you go around calling people lazy, I suggest you put more thought into why creating more options for people who are overwhelmed by options is generally not productive and can cause unintended consequences and expose liability. With some more thought, you'll also realize that AWS is optimized for businesses and, as stated, losing customers or data is much worse than paying a higher bill, which can always be negotiated after the fact.

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#348

Post by magicbuzz »

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…

Er..no. Lookup Dokku

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#349

Post by abol3z »

Jelastic PaaS did this a long time ago, and in much better form. It is possible to automatically scale your apps horizontally or vertically without any additional configs. I really don't understand why it is not that popular, It is the smoothest cloud experience I had compared to any other PaaS I tested.

Re: DigitalOcean App Platform

#350

Post by manigandham »

donmcronald wrote: post #296
manigandham wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard spend limits are not an easy problem with cloud. There are too many things that incur costs. Everytime this comes up, I ask the same question: what do you expect to happen when the quota is hit? Shutdown your servers? Wipe your SSDs and storage buckets? Remove your DNS records? Should it be permanent? If not then they're just subsidizing the costs. If it's soft-limit then its just a warning, and if you just want…

> Shutdown your servers? Wipe your SSDs and storage buckets? Remove your DNS records? Should it be permanent? I'd be absolutely fine with that in a sub-account or resource group as long as I had to enable it. A while back I wanted to try out an Azure Resource Manager template as part of learning something. Since I was _learning_ it, I wasn't 100% positive what it was going to do, but I knew that it should cost about…

Since the vast majority of errors are user error, this is just another potential disaster waiting to happen.
Post reply on HN