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

Tell HN: I DDoSed myself using CloudFront and Lambda Edge and got a $4.5k bill

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 348 posts

Re: Tell HN: I DDoSed myself using CloudFront and Lambda Edge and got a $4.5k bill

#41

Post by noasaservice »

bombcar wrote: post #36
hnlmorg wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've experienced plenty of scenarios where costs have quite legitimately spiked. Ultimately whatever solution you put in place, someone is going to complain about it. At least with the system they currently have in place they can reimburse customers. Whereas it is a lot harder to fix their reputation after they've automatically stopped production services.

Given how easily they reimburse customers, I suspect it's intentional - one can be "fixed after the fact" and the other can't - if your site goes down during a slashdotting and you lose sales, etc, there's no getting those back, but if you inadvertently run costs high, they can just refund/cancel those costs.

Azure HAS this hard limit feature already.

Ive seen nobody on HN, twitter, reddit complain about "my site was down during heavy business since i turned on hard billing setting". Not a single person.

However, I see frantic after frantic post of "I was testing something on AWS and it caused me a $X000 or $X0000 bill."

But as the posts in here are apt to suggest - you can always beg AWS support for a reversal. Great plan there.

Re: Tell HN: I DDoSed myself using CloudFront and Lambda Edge and got a $4.5k bill

#42

Post by steve_adams_86 »

For the future, I’m not sure if it suits you but I find you can get a far easier, cheaper, and more predictable dev and deploy experience without using something like CloudFront.

I once moved a project from AWS to Digitalocean for a small team (AWS was just all they knew, so it was what they used) and I was able to cut the monthly bill down quite a bit.

It isn’t that DO is inherently cheaper or better. It’s just dead simple so it’s easy to deploy with only what you actually need, with easy limits and visibility on what gets spun up. In some cases it’s arguably less cost efficient, but it’s really hard to mess up.

For the team I was supporting, simply having the visibility and a simple tool was worth a lot in saved time. They previously spent way too much time on AWS, and couldn’t even get the right infrastructure with the time they invested.

So, maybe something worth considering at least. Good luck with the bill! You’re certainly not alone (I got an $800 charge for a db I forgot to kill a few years ago).

Re: Tell HN: I DDoSed myself using CloudFront and Lambda Edge and got a $4.5k bill

#43

Post by Beltiras »

This is partly the reason why I would never use anything besides VMs or baremetal I provision myself. I'd rather have scaling problems I can solve by provisioning more hardware than billing problems because I fudged the setup. Yes, AWS might be good refunding "oopsies" but when trying to bootstrap a business I have better things to do than recover from heart palpitations.

Re: Tell HN: I DDoSed myself using CloudFront and Lambda Edge and got a $4.5k bill

#44

Post by aelzeiny »

jtwebman wrote: post #26

For small projects why do you need the scale? I feel like once you need the scale serverless is the way more expensive then even managed Kubernetes. I still think serverless is hosting services way to make far more money with the illusion that it is easier when it really isn't. Logging is normally a huge pain. Local dev is usually a huge pain. Managing versions is a pain over just git branches especially over multipl…

To expand on this OP, I've done the AWS-full-stack approach in a mid-sized startup. Modern Serverless problems require modern serverless solutions. That ecosystem is simply not as developed as "traditional" web-server CI/CD. Here are some things that you will eventually need to optimize for.

- After crossing a certain threshold in scaling needs, Lambda costs more than regular EC2 on ELB

- Lambda cold-start times can be a deal-breaker when users first visit your website. If you contact AWS they will tell you to setup a simple cron job that keep lambdas "warm". But AWS provides no visibility in what's warm or cold, or which endpoints link to which lambdas.

- Dealing with Cloudwatch logs of various lambda runs (IMHO) is objectively a bad dev experience. Query insights is getting better, but is still a pain to work with.

- To reduce deployment and development times, you'll eventually want to deep-dive into lambda layers. Modern problems modern solutions.

- One lambda calling and awaiting another lambda is not a supported first-class use-case. There's no API that allows you to get the status of a lambda run. There's a hack around this where you use AWS Step-Functions. Modern problems modern solutions.

We're still on AWS full-stack "serverless" for our webserver and realtime stream processor. At the time I didn't know what I was getting my company into. I wish I just made a Flask webserver instead.

Re: Tell HN: I DDoSed myself using CloudFront and Lambda Edge and got a $4.5k bill

#45

Post by HWR_14 »

drdrek wrote: post #8

AWS may promote the technologies as prototype friendly but at the end of the day its built to be enterprise grade production tool. A company will not even bother with a 4000$ mistake, its just the price of doing business so there is little incentive to address these types of problems. Playing around with AWS for side projects is like using a chainsaw, it can really accelerate your work but if you are going to make a…

Using AWS for sideprojects is a great way to make sure you have AWS skills the next time you interview, assuming you aren't using it at work.

Re: Tell HN: I DDoSed myself using CloudFront and Lambda Edge and got a $4.5k bill

#46

Post by speedgoose »

noasaservice wrote: post #39
jenny91 wrote: post #37

I want to offer two counterpoints to common sentiments here regarding AWS billing. 1. Don't be afraid of playing around with AWS (and even spending some money). AWS is really good at refunding you if you accidentally rack up a couple grand in surprise bills. Also even if you legitimately spin up big servers to try a kubernetes cluster for a couple of days, that $20 you spent is almost certainly great bang-for-buck fo…

Azure supports hard stops on services with billing maximums. It does mean that stuff gets turned off if you enable that. Then again, as an individual, that's a superb way to control costs. And since Scamazon doesn't do that and INSTEAD "gives" you a 1 month unlimited credit, there's no telling just how stratospheric your bill can be. > AWS is really good at refunding you if you accidentally rack up a couple grand in…

Azure doesn’t support spending limits on all subscription types though.

https://azure.microsoft.com/support/legal/offer-details/

Re: Tell HN: I DDoSed myself using CloudFront and Lambda Edge and got a $4.5k bill

#49

Post by noasaservice »

speedgoose wrote: post #46
noasaservice wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Azure supports hard stops on services with billing maximums. It does mean that stuff gets turned off if you enable that. Then again, as an individual, that's a superb way to control costs. And since Scamazon doesn't do that and INSTEAD "gives" you a 1 month unlimited credit, there's no telling just how stratospheric your bill can be. > AWS is really good at refunding you if you accidentally rack up a couple grand in…

Azure doesn’t support spending limits on all subscription types though. https://azure.microsoft.com/support/legal/offer-details/

Completely true. However if what you're doing is highly price sensitive and willing to accept downtime over ScaryBill, then this the option you all need. And it's completely (and I bet intentionally) not available on AWS. AWS's message is "bend over and we'll tell you how far and long".

Larger companies see $4k as a nothing; pay and move on. Household budgets, not so much.

Re: Tell HN: I DDoSed myself using CloudFront and Lambda Edge and got a $4.5k bill

#50

Post by rozenmd »

capableweb wrote: post #20

Off-topic maybe, but I'm very curious as it's hard to find hard numbers: > my usual bill is $200/month How many req/second are you serving? What kind of things are happening? It seems like the bills are outrageously expensive when it comes to various cloud services, as I'm personally hosting a service that does between 10-100 req/second on average during a month, and my monthly bill end up being closer to $40/month,…

I run 1.2 million uptime checks per week, my total AWS bill was $150/mo before I migrated to permanently running VMs - it's definitely doable without trying too hard.
Post reply on HN