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

141–150 of 348 posts

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

#141

Post by Mo3 »

taylodl wrote: post #134
zamadatix wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For 99% of projects you're never going to hit the point a single server (or group of servers if you truly need redundancy for some level of uptime) can't handle the load. For the other 1% that end up needing that scale I have a hard time accepting it's actually better to start building for massive scale day 1 instead of day 1000.

If the solution you're building is business-critical then you already have a problem day one: you need high-availability. That means you need at least two servers. As soon as you add that additional server your troubles have begun. Doesn't really much matter whether you add 1 server to your setup or 100. Your problems compound if you have to consider disaster recovery (DR) and need an offsite location you can failove…

I completely agree with you. I really suspect some people have never seen themselves how insanely, mind-bogglingly powerful AWS is.

Try doing this [0] with your dedicated servers in under 10 minutes.

And then try attaching highly-available scripts/cloud functions and dozens of different integrated functionality in seconds.

And then try setting up good Network ACL, firewalls, route tables, NAT gateways, load balancers with a few clicks.

... and people here are seriously suggesting that instead using AWS would equal a massive forced scaling operation. Lol.

[0]: https://i.ibb.co/TKmB9HX/image.png

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

#142

Post by itsmemattchung »

sirwitti wrote: post #74

I'm very much on the boring technology side of things with respect to hosting. 40€ / month gets you a very powerful dedicated server that can easily handle millions of requests per day and performs incredibly well and can be managed easily. If you also use containers you even get quite a bit of flexibility and agility. To be honest I don't really understand the sentiment that developers can get away with not knowing…

Amen.

I've consulted for companies that went all in on AWS Lambda + AWS SQS, only to transition them to an EC2 instance that performs the same computations at a fraction of the cost.

No — you do not need K8 on day one.

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

#143

Post by Mo3 »

razemio wrote: post #136
Mo3 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know about that, the hedge fund I work for is US-based and AWS can be fully SEC and FINRA compliant. We also have a few dedicated servers, but mostly only for infrequently accessed data and logging that doesn’t need to be highly available. I really can’t understand why this argument keeps coming up. Different solutions for different usecases. Yet anytime Kubernetes or cloud functions are discussed people come…

Pretty easy, OP sounds exactly like a guy who would have been perfectly fine with a single (Hetzner) server. Then these arguments popup and they are most of the time right. I agree with you, that it always depends on the use. However, hurr durr Hetzner Server seems to be the more reasonable choice here (once again).

Why? If you had the choice between complete redundancy and infinite scaling by default while having almost zero work, or using a dedicated server that you need to configure and constantly maintain, what would you choose?

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

#144

Post by eropple »

300bps wrote: post #96
nojito wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people don't need to scale and even running 5x redundant servers is cheaper than a comparable cloud solution.

Running Lambda, I get a million calls per month for free. Then it's 20 cents per million calls. Just curious - have you really researched cloud solutions or did you just compare the price of hosting EC2 instances in AWS vs having your own server? Because that's not what cloud is about.

So I'm actually in the process of doing Lambda versus persistent costing right now for a new project, where it's heavily load-based and very spiky, but the work on each packet of information is actually very lightweight. The tricky part here in AWS is not Lambda, which is pretty reasonable in general--the pitfalls I'm seeing are around data storage. DynamoDB is stealthily very expensive, either provisioned or on-demand. Right now I'm converging on lambdas for compute and RDS/S3 for storage, but what really makes AWS shine for this use case more than anything else is SQS.

SQS is so good and that there isn't a great, easily deployed (sorry, RabbitMQ) option for exactly what it does is a real push towards AWS. (GCP Cloud PubSub is close enough, but I know AWS way better than I do GCP.) If I didn't need this, and I felt confident managing RabbitMQ as a queueing solution, I don't think AWS would be a compelling solution because $60 in Hetzner nodes, in a HA configuration, could do a lot of work.

(If this thing works I'll need an on-prem solution anyway, so I'll probably have to build that too--but that's "good problems to have".)

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

#145

Post by noasaservice »

j16sdiz wrote: post #63
joatmon-snoo wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there were hard limits, that would also mean that the billing system is on the critical path for all systems, and not just an after-the-fact ETL.

For dev system, I can't see why no hard limits.

For the companies I've worked for, having HARD limits on devs would put the C-levels minds at ease.

At this moment, any dev with AWS keys has an unlimited month-per-month credit line that the company is on the hook for paying. And at best is the hope and prayer that the billing notifications aren't utter shit.

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

#146

Post by eropple »

Nextgrid wrote: post #127
Keyframe wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but how will you scale up your multi-dozen-users-at-the-same-time app easily then?

How do you scale your cloud app? Usually, the hard part of scaling isn't raw compute power, it's scaling your datastore after you've already exhausted the option of throwing more compute power at it, and this problem remains whether you're on the cloud or not. Until you hit that problem however, throwing more hardware at it is the right solution (you may be surprised just how much load a single Postgres server on bar…

I agree with this in general, but would caveat that AWS etc. have made throwing more hardware at the datastore solution a lot easier. You're right that a bare-metal Postgres monster can serve a lot--but Aurora Serverless V2, if you can live with its (pretty mild IMO) quirks and if you can pay for it, is a profoundly hard-to-argue-with offering.

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

#147

Post by jlmorton »

sirwitti wrote: post #74

I'm very much on the boring technology side of things with respect to hosting. 40€ / month gets you a very powerful dedicated server that can easily handle millions of requests per day and performs incredibly well and can be managed easily. If you also use containers you even get quite a bit of flexibility and agility. To be honest I don't really understand the sentiment that developers can get away with not knowing…

I'm a fan of boring technology too, but I would like to suggest to you that Serverless _is_ kind of boring.

Essentially you just upload a ZIP of your application, and register a handler function that takes a JSON payload.

Obviously this is quite a bit more boring than a K8s cluster, with a bunch of nodes, networking, Helm charts, etc.

I would posit that even compared to something like a DO Droplet, Serverless is still kind of boring. Everything is going to fit into the model of registering a handler function to accept a JSON payload. There's no debate about whether we're going to have Nginx, or what USGI runtime we're using. It's just a function.

And with Serverless, your cost for doing a couple million, 2-second-long requests is about four cents.

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

#148

Post by jpalomaki »

jsiepkes wrote: post #126
jpalomaki wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Servers can also be liability. You need to document, implement and maintaing hardening, have a process for regularly patching os and apps, monitor logs, have backup and disaster recovery procedures, regularly test the procedures, figure how to implement data encryption at rest, implement high-availability and so on. Good platform-as-service can solve many things for you and let you focus on the core thing you are pro…

I'd rather worry about (and fix) those technical problems then having to deal with possible billing-pocalyse.

Take for example OS and app upgrades. Quite often you have few requirements, for example 1)all updates should be first tested in test env 2)updates need to be installed in timely manner 3)critical updates need to be installed quickly (30 days is too slow)

When you start thinking these, they are not so easy. (1) means you can’t just run “apt upgrade” on every server - you need to manage the updates to make sure they get tested first. (2) is kind of ok, but requires some work on regular basis (at least checking things) (3) means you need to monitor the updates for your stack and classify them. You can get feeds for example for Ubuntu, but does that cover whole stack. And checking these weekly (or daily) actually gets boring.

All this stuff can be done, but IMHO it is time consuming and takes time from more important things. The weekly/monthly JIRA tickets for checking x, y and z get quite annoying when you also have n other things to finish. Then you start slacking on them and feel the pain when trying to collect evidence for the next procurement process check.

If you have tens or hundreds of servers and can have a separate infra team with professional sysadmins then this is all fine. My rant is mainly for small teams, where same guys are supposed to develop and run things.

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

#149

Post by joemi »

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…

> AWS is really good at refunding you if you accidentally rack up a couple grand in surprise bills.

I wouldn't bet my bank account on that always holding true. If it's not in the terms and conditions that they'll refund you for accidental mistakes that lead to high billing, then you're gambling if you assume they will.

Post reply on HN