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

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

#161

Post by jedberg »

This is a well known but poorly publicized issue with Lambda -- that they can get stuck in infinite loops and run up your bill.

I advise anyone I work with that if you are calling one lambda from another anywhere in your system, you should generate a request ID with every inbound request and then pass it along with each call as part of the context, and then error out if you see the same request again.

The good news is that AWS is aware of this and that their alarms are delayed, and will almost always waive the fees for you if you ask.

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

#162

Post by Mo3 »

tluyben2 wrote: post #138
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…

Because some people here do exactly the same thing with aws/cloud. Not you but many here treat aws like it’s the thing you should use ‘because scaling and failover and omg 1 sec downtime’. And then the stories like OP showing that it is dangerous and my experience that most who do this are overpaying and could do with a hetzner server or, better even, a $5/mo vps, even if they do it right (which they are not, general…

Obviously the billing mechanism (or, lack of control) is an issue but that doesn't negate the whole concept. They could (and should) easily fix this by implementing hard caps to activate if so required.

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

#164

Post by Mo3 »

horsawlarway wrote: post #157
300bps wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Running Lambda, I get a million calls per month for free. Then it's 20 cents per million calls. 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…

Of course you are paying more for AWS than for a damn raspberry pi.

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

#165

Post by bilekas »

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…

This. The company I work for use AWS and that makes sense for the level they scale at etc and I'm sure they work out a deal with Amazon.

I have a few dedicated servers monthly cost ~100$, never ran into any problems, for a brief period I needed to pay cloudflare for some dns management that was getting a bit heavy, but even that was because I didn't know enough as to how to optimize.

For any personal projects etc / POC's even startups launching to less than 100k daily users (traffic and load type dependant ofc) hold off on the AWS>

I also don't like the lambda architecture in AWS as it seems to lock you into it in a sense, you're almost tied to that infrastructure for good. Yes you can rework it but thats tech debt that may not be possible.

Love AWS but only as an enterprise solution.

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

#166

Post by bilekas »

jlmorton wrote: post #147
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 stil…

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

This seems wrong to me ? Can you explain a bit more ? Are these just API requests or ?

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

#167

Post by booi »

cft wrote: post #137
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 ran a website with 37 million users and 3.6Gbps peak bandwidth (JavaScript+thumbnails, no video) from my own two racks of Linux servers thay i have not systematically updated for years. The OSes were beyond the lts support winows. I manually compiled my own updates, but very rarely and only those that i deemed critical. Granted, the site stack was completely custom so the standard automated hacks didn't work. In 15…

I dont think this should be standard. It sounds like you’re saying you ran a service with 37 million people’s information on a software stack that was so old that not even the vendor is supporting it anymore and could be riddled with security issues that you wouldn’t even know much less be able to detect? It may work but certainly not going to get any security certifications this way..

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

#168

Post by iforgotpassword »

Mo3 wrote: post #119
tluyben2 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in fintech (banking and payments) and most of our clients aren’t even allowed to host on aws; they have to go for a local provider because aws doesn’t have a hosting hub in their country. Not sure what part you work in but this has never been a problem in the past 20 years with just servers, switches, load balancers etc. I prefer aws over metal for these kind of setups, but for many other cases I definitely do…

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…

Nobody says there isn't any use case for AWS. The point is that "the cool kids" like to start their side projects on AWS. Nothing about it is mission critical. I guarantee you op is not working on some Fintech stuff.

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

#169

Post by s1k3s »

While reading through these threads I always get a feeling that everyone's working at YouTube or stuff like that, and they need to serve millions of users per hour. Meanwhile I'm in my corner here with an old-school $20 VPS that does just fine for my 10k users.

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

#170

Post by Mo3 »

eropple wrote: post #144
300bps wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-dema…

DynamoDB is not required to use cloud functions. You can either use regular RDS like you said, Aurora or even just your own EC2-based cluster (all of these you can attach to the VPC the functions are attached to as well) and there's a lot of nice developments going on like Cloudflare D1.

Totally agree on SQS, knowing PubSub as well I'd say they're pretty much on the same level. All the interconnectedness is where cloud platforms shine

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