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Burnt $72k testing Firebase and Cloud Run and almost went bankrupt

blog.tomilkieway.com

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Re: Burnt $72k testing Firebase and Cloud Run and almost went bankrupt

#181

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

teekert wrote: post #56
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google let go of our bill as a one time gesture! We've seen this happen with similar stories on AWS. Neither platform supports prepayment with a hard limit on costs, and this seems unlikely to change.

Yeah a friend of mine wanted a real cert, not letsencrypt (I don't understand how that is more real but ok), as a bit of a noob he clicked around on the AWS website and some days later had a bill op 1500 eur. They also nulled it. Still, this scares the hell out of me.

AWS Certificate Manager gives you free non-extended SSL to your machine, it's pretty nifty.

Re: Burnt $72k testing Firebase and Cloud Run and almost went bankrupt

#182

Post by sudcha »

Alupis wrote: post #165

As J. Paul Getty once mused[1]: > If you owe the bank $100 that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem. Crappy situation for OP and his startup, but I find the part about reading up on bankruptcy to be a bit premature. Perhaps not the most ethical choice, but what stops OP from just not paying the bill, and finding a different cloud provider? Obviously they'll want to not repeat t…

OP here.

Bankruptcy fear was real at the time. Google has at least a few thousand lawyers on payroll. They probably also have a process of handling delinquencies and sending them notices. A quick look at the lawyer fee to just manage the case, let alone fight it, is enough for bootstrapped company to raise hands.

+1 to bad actors possibility. I shared this with Google team, I'm not sure what they have done since.

We are out of that situation and I wrote the post so others, relatively new to Cloud don't make same mistakes.

Fail fast is a very bad idea with Cloud.

Re: Burnt $72k testing Firebase and Cloud Run and almost went bankrupt

#183

Post by Symbiote »

bjarneh wrote: post #129
donmcronald wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t set a limit like that on my CC, so the first charge for $5k would have cleared meaning it would have run way longer and racked up way more usage. I’d bet you my computer I would have been out at least the $5k that cleared.

You're probably correct. It really makes you think twice about setting up some of those cloud services without a hard limit cutoff.

I normally receive only my "part" of my corporate credit card statement, but earlier this year I was sent more of it.

That's when I found out the card has a credit limit of over €50,000.

Reading this, I wonder if we should contact the bank and ask for another card with a lower limit, to use with various cloud services. We are 99% on-premises, but have about €200/month in various GCS/AWS usage.

Re: Burnt $72k testing Firebase and Cloud Run and almost went bankrupt

#184

Post by brundolf »

serial_dev wrote: post #23
onion2k wrote: post #3

The fact that cloud providers don't have a simple "This is how much I can afford, don't ever bill me more than that!" box on their platforms makes development a lot scarier than it really needs to be.

It is baffling why cloud providers don't have that option. I might want to have an app because I don't mind spending 50 dollars on my pet project as a hobby, but I don't ever want to spend more than that. Not if I write a wrong query that's suddenly becomes very expensive, not when I got attacked, and not even when I have legit users. By the way, the same goes for some companies, too, just the threshold would be diff…

For hobby projects you probably don't need auto-scaling, and should use a provider that charges a fixed monthly rate. You'll "waste" a little bit of money on unused uptime, but for a hobby project it will be a minuscule amount.

Re: Burnt $72k testing Firebase and Cloud Run and almost went bankrupt

#185

Post by ludocode »

iooi wrote: post #142
throwaway7281 wrote: post #8

To put it into perspective: You give me $72K and I'll set you up a 1PB replicated storage infra with a total of 100+ available CPU cores and half a TB RAM. I saw people burning through cash in the cloud, which makes you wonder weather money is any concern at all.

Because electricity is free. And internet is also free. And the rooms to put the servers are also free. A/C is free. And backup generators are free. And diesel is free.

You can rent a full 42U rack in a colocation center for ~$1500/mo easily. They'll handle all of that stuff, including redundant power and redundant internet.

Of course self-hosting on real hardware is not quite as simple or cheap as GP made it out to be. But everything in your post can be solved with simple fixed pricing, which is still the main point: there are no dangers of wildly variable pricing or accidental massive bills as there are with cloud hosting providers.

Re: Burnt $72k testing Firebase and Cloud Run and almost went bankrupt

#186

Post by sudcha »

greatgib wrote: post #69

At the end of page 2, there is a good ass licking bullshit sentence: > He said that as an ex googler and as the beneficiary of a gesture, but this contradict the full history he told us. If the doc and tools were so great, why he felt into this situation?

OP here.

Maybe it comes across like that, but as somebody building a product with very limited resources, Google's documentation is one of the best so far.

The situation was our fault too. I just went with a test and fail fast attitude, just like with every things we do a dev environment.

Re: Burnt $72k testing Firebase and Cloud Run and almost went bankrupt

#187

Post by cambalache »

onion2k wrote: post #3

The fact that cloud providers don't have a simple "This is how much I can afford, don't ever bill me more than that!" box on their platforms makes development a lot scarier than it really needs to be.

That should be illegal, but hey, at least they support noble causes, so let them be. It sounds cynic but this is their game.

Re: Burnt $72k testing Firebase and Cloud Run and almost went bankrupt

#188

Post by vmception »

LordHeini wrote: post #42

That sort of crap is the reason we host all our stuff on root servers. Even trying to read the amazon pricing for their instances, hours and what not, drives me insane. Seems this is done on purpose. no wonder they make so much money with it. So i have never seen a reason to move any stuff to the cloud. Just grab a dedicated server for a few bucks and put a bunch of docker containers on those. Its way cheaper, usuall…

> Most apps don't need scaling anyway and if you do

Man, exactly right. Many of guys here would love crypto once you stop asking why and start asking how.

The most lucrative projects these days are completely frontend UI, they don't even their own backends they as just read state from the nearest node when the client connects their wallet.

Some people forgot that the scalability game was to convert traffic into money. So ditch that, and remember you are in the money game.

Re: Burnt $72k testing Firebase and Cloud Run and almost went bankrupt

#190

Post by cambalache »

raphaelj wrote: post #163
onion2k wrote: post #3

The fact that cloud providers don't have a simple "This is how much I can afford, don't ever bill me more than that!" box on their platforms makes development a lot scarier than it really needs to be.

It's ever worse for services like AWS Cloudfront. One of your competitors could just rent a cheap server on OVH with uncapped transfer and incur you $10k in cost in a few hours.

Maybe that it is your cue to move your server from AWS to OVH*

* I dont have any idea about OVH

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