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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

#201

Post by turtlebits »

peterangular wrote: post #155
jsiepkes wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Also the cost of those services vs. a few well-configured basic VPS hosts is nuts. I was shocked to learn that to get MySQL/Postgres in GCP it's often >$40/month - even for the insanely tiny instance sizes. We're talking for like 20G storage... 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…

If you had no knowledge on standing up a DB server (installing, configuring, monitoring, logging, access control, and backups, restricting network access), how much time would that take you to learn? That and your VPS requires setup for access control, patches, updates, monitoring, logging.

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

#202

Post by jokethrowaway »

Consider it an expensive lesson on not giving your credit card to those scammers.

Aws model is incredibly predatory. All the companies I've seen move to AWS ended up spending way more than before for much less gained. And they still needed an ops team, just more expensive than the sysadmin they had before to manage actual servers.

I'll stick to VPS

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

#203

Post by Mo3 »

horsawlarway wrote: post #195
Mo3 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With all due respect, I don't think you've ever actually put together a local cluster. I have, and still do. It's neither redundant nor highly available. The power source isn't, the internet connection isn't and it's also located in my basement and not multiple regions. > The problems are almost never scaling the web servers. The problem is scaling the infrastructure that those servers need to be useful. There you…

With regards to your image... so what? Virtual networking equipment is virtual - I too can spin up hundreds of subnets for nothing. My internal transfer costs are also.... drumroll... zero. (ok - technically, at some point I bought a 10gbs switch and 500ft of ethernet cable) Lets talk about what it costs you put data back out onto the net, or into a different region. Then lets compare long term storage costs. Because…

> I too can spin up hundreds of subnets for nothing.

Really? In completely different physical locations with inter-region routing and NAT gateways for each region that route into a redundant load balancer? Then you're right and don't need AWS any more. However, I'd suspect your costs would not be very affordable either.

> Lets talk about what it costs you put data back out onto the net, or into a different region.

If you're seriously trying to compare your residential internet connection with something like this I'm not going to go there..

> Then lets compare long term storage costs.

Same logic applies.

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

#204

Post by TurningCanadian »

booi wrote: post #167
cft wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..

Not to mention that a successful compromise could be used to serve malware to the users.

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

#205

Post by turtlebits »

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…

Standing up a service isn't only about compute. Where is your logging, metrics, alerting? Even with a server, you need methods for access control, hardening, log rotation, updates/patches (what happens when the OS goes out of support?).

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

#206

Post by TameAntelope »

Lorin wrote: post #59
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…

Interestingly, AWS won't refund service credits provided by an accelerator if you've accidentally blown through those instead.

How the fuck do you blow through $150k at an early stage startup???

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

#208

Post by vforvalerio »

ralusek wrote: post #9

One of my biggest fears. What's to prevent trolls and competitors from just spamming your endpoints in a loop? How do people using pay-per-use infra deal with these problems? I really want to use Lambda for public endpoints but it just scares me.

No post body was provided.

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

#209

Post by tluyben2 »

iforgotpassword wrote: post #172
Mo3 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If with one thing, a single mistake can result in a $5k bill, and with the other I have a guaranteed fixed bill of 50 bucks a month, then unless I have enough money to burn, the choice is crystal clear. Maybe you wipe your butt with 100$ bills. Others aren't that lucky.

Exactly; if it is ‘the same’ but with a guarantee of max 50$/mo then sure, I would pick that, but that is not the case, also not with caps. So it is an entirely different case and usually the 50$ option actually brings you very far without any financial risk outside that $50/mo.

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

#210

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]
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