211–220 of 348 posts
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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???
I think every developer has an AWS billing horror story. My horror story is that my site allows users to upload videos and share them to a limited number of colleagues. When a user requests a video, a CloudFront URL is created that lasts a few hours. I had not thought much about hotlinking because the link only lasts a few hours - what would be the point? Well, those few hours make a big difference when it’s linked o…
How popular is that vietnamese porn site!!
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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.
I say this as an engineer who has a ton of relational DB experience. Before cloud providers w/DB options were so plentiful devs/engineers/sysadmins would have to set this up by hand.
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> If you had no knowledge on standing up a DB server
My point is, "but yea what if you do?" There's actual value in that I've found, especially when I'm looking to save pennies at the early-stage of a startup while in the customer aq phase. Many folks have expertise in those areas without needing a cloud provider.
I do get the "but all of these things!" argument (access control, patches, updates, monitoring, logging) but often those are easily solved/solvable problems even without leveraging cloud offerings. I can get very far along with an ELK/TIG stack + uptime robot and basic VPS networking features... all for a very affordable monthly bill on the infra.
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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…
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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.
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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.
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> 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 ?
It's admittedly a simplification and a best case. For AWS Lambda, the price is in GB-seconds, and the amount of CPU available to your function is itself a function of the memory allocated. The price is $0.0000166667 for every GB-second on X86. So it looks like I've also misplaced a decimal. It's $0.20 per 1M requests with 1GB of memory. Lambdas can be sized from 128MB to 10GB, and pricing depends on the resources all…
So if I had a "hello world" function, that basically just returned a constant JSON payload...I'm seriously looking at a pittance, pennies for millions of requests? I.e. $0.20?
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> 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.
There are certainly cases where AWS can be better (ease of edge networks and multi-region availability come to mind)
But outside of a very small set of cases (most of which are when companies are victims of their own success - which is actually a wonderful problem to have) what's the compelling reason to actually use AWS if "Of course I am paying more" for it?
In my opinion, if you can still run your db on a single machine - you don't fucking need the cloud yet. That covers a pretty large chunk of businesses.
Most of the "cloud" is convincing business that could self-host their entire stack on a raspberry pi in a basement that they should be spending thousands on cloud compute costs a year.
Fuck - the most damning evidence is simply how much fucking money these companies are making from upselling you cpu cycles that they're getting mostly for free. For the 4th quarter of 2021, amazon reported a profit of 5.2 billion on ~18 billion in revenue from AWS.
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> 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 ?
It's admittedly a simplification and a best case. For AWS Lambda, the price is in GB-seconds, and the amount of CPU available to your function is itself a function of the memory allocated. The price is $0.0000166667 for every GB-second on X86. So it looks like I've also misplaced a decimal. It's $0.20 per 1M requests with 1GB of memory. Lambdas can be sized from 128MB to 10GB, and pricing depends on the resources all…
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…