151–160 of 348 posts
Really wish the major clouds had a “I’m experimenting. Kill it if it goes over 1k usd” mode. Not some crappy alerts - actual halt (and delete if necessary) I bet that would increase profits too by encouraging people try experiment more
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…
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 started off using Lambda as well and made the same sort of mistake. I can't remember exactly how much my bill was, but it was enough that it would have drained all my savings and effectively kill my startup. AWS was kind enough to write off most of it. We now use Lambda only for simple cron / background tasks, or consuming from Kinesis. We use ECS for everything else. ECS is nice because it's relatively simple comp…
I am definitely considering it, but struggling to choose between ECS, Elastic Beanstalk or EC2.
My past experience with ECS was a bit frustrating because I was forced to use CodeCommit to deploy and I didn't liked that. I would prefer to deploy directly from CI, for example from GitHub actions.
I rarely use AWS for smaller projects, and prefer to either use Digital Ocean or bare metal from a local data center (well local when I lived in NY). After a surprise bill like this, I would re-evaluate what serverless is actually giving me.
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.
In contrast I've ran some pretty hot-and-heavy MySQL/Postgres databases on basic DO/Linode VPS's for half of that cost with much success. I get these cloud tools give a ton of "out of box" features - but you are paying for it at the end of the day.
Anecdotally I've noticed a huge shift away from general devs/engineers having general CLI/Linux/sysadmin knowledge.
reminds me when I set up an S3 triggered lambda function that also wrote into the same directory. What ensued was millions of files and folders generated recursively. Fortunately, AWS was kind enough to reverse the billing. Had this been Google Cloud, I would've gotten the cold shoulder and a low key threat that if I reverse the transaction I would lose access to my other paid Google products outside GCP :/
S3 has some setting where you can log activity on a bucket into another bucket
But that setting allows you to set the destination bucket to be the same bucket that you're monitoring. So ~30s after something happens on the monitored bucket, S3 writes a log into the same bucket. And then that activity triggers the logging again. So every ~30-60s, forever, there's a little log written into the bucket.
It takes a while to add up to something noticeable if your monthly AWS bill is already a few digits long. It's super fun to sift through the bucket a few months later when you're trying to figure out if there's any real data in the bucket or just endless logs.
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.
And you are overpaying by a significant chunk. My raspberry pi - the old cheap one - can handle 10 million requests a day without breaking a sweat. If I push it, I can get up around 90 million requests a day without too much effort (it's only about 1 request/ms)
I really don't think most devs understand how fucking cheap hardware that's comparable to these services is.
Now - you might be using a host of other valuable features that your cloud provider gives you (things like edge servers near your customers, or truly significant outbound network traffic flows, or a very robust multi-region setup, or disk backing of some sort, etc).
But generally speaking - you ARE overpaying for cpu cycles in the cloud. It's not really up for debate.
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…
It's really difficult for AWS or any other serverless provider for that matter, to achieve a kind of "bulletproof and safe user experience" across different offerings that encompasses everything that has to do with billing/monitoring/alerting and then also cover all kinds of potential customer scenarios (like the function calling itself, as one example). For example, it's totally understandable that the alarms can be…
If that alert triggered earlier (and $300 would have been triggered in an hour), my all accumulated charges would be only $400 not $4500.
So the hard learning here is that CloudFront charges takes time to appear on your bill, up to 24 hours.
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…
A single VPS is great if you don't need reliability or scale, but if you care about those things you probably need at least a few of them running behind load balancers, and you probably don't want humans manually poking at them (but rather you want some reproducibility). Moreover, there's a bunch of host management stuff you're taking upon yourself--configuring metrics collection and log collection and SSH and certs and stateful backups/replication/failover and application deployment and process management and a whole bunch of other things that come for free with serverless.
Implying that serverless/Kubernetes/whatever is just hype ("cool kids") while ignoring the pretty significant discrepancies in requirements is pretty silly.