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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

#221

Post by codegangsta »

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…

I think NATS is an excellent, and very easy to run and deploy. Pretty much has a "just works" attribute I like to assign to boring technology

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

#222

Post by kjhjkhf »

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…

the cloud means you get to write sexy code and call yourself an engineer

not the cloud means you write boring configuration files and call yourself a sysadmin

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

#223

Post by detaro »

refulgentis wrote: post #217
jlmorton wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 not day to day on cloud stuff, haven't been in a while, that's why I'm asking this, not intended to be passive-aggressive: 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?

yes.

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

#224

Post by Nextgrid »

Mo3 wrote: post #183
horsawlarway wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With all due respect and no offense intended, your perspective sounds a lot like "I've never attempted to scale so I can't understand the problems" With all due respect, I don't think you've ever actually put together a local cluster. A simple 4 machine k8s cluster sitting literally on dirt in my basement can scale out to the equivalent of thousands of dollars of AWS spend a month. I broke even on the initial purch…

> 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…

> 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.

For a lot of projects this doesn’t matter. The cost of downtime might be lower than the cost of high availability and occasional downtime is OK.

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

#225

Post by davidfstr »

jpalomaki wrote: post #116
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…

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…

> Servers can also be liability. You need to document, implement and maintaing hardening, have a process for regularly patching os and apps, […], have backup and disaster recovery procedures, regularly test the procedures, […] and so on.

Much of this complexity I eliminate by using the Immutable Server pattern:

Specifically I deploy my app as a Docker container hosted on a virtual machine cluster managed by AWS ElasticBeanstalk. OS upgrades and patches (outside the container) are done by AWS.

If anything goes wrong with a VM I just terminate it and a different fresh VM spins up to take its place.

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

#226

Post by horsawlarway »

Mo3 wrote: post #203
horsawlarway wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 do realize we're agreeing?

I'm saying the things that are hard to do yourself aren't fucking cheap in the cloud either.

My counter point (and the one you keep dodging) is that the things that are EASY to do yourself aren't fucking cheap in the cloud, and they scale out just fine for the vast majority of non-Saas businesses.

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

#227

Post by vforvalerio »

daniel-cussen wrote: post #109

So the whole point of AWS is you can scale up on demand. The point of it is there's no capital expenditures so you can scale up crazy fast. More scale more bills. Bills on demand. Now, there's two sides to the second part of this. The following is a tiny bite of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The good is that Amazon has a policy of leniency. So writing them personally and explaining and aski…

No post body was provided.

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

#228

Post by rollcat »

jpalomaki wrote: post #116
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…

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 agree with you in general, that it's best not to solve problems you don't have, but it's worth considering what exactly do the alternatives offer, as you might end up trading one kind of complexity or maintenance burden for another.

Fixed workload, shared dev boxes, all kinds of small-scale operations fit very well onto a bare metal / VPS box in someone else's rack. The maintenance work often boils down to setting up cron with unattended upgrades and borgbackup, Docker with Traefik+ACME as the web frontend, etc.

PaaS solutions will often pull you in the direction of getting "addons" or using extra paid services for every component you might need: a relational database, a cache, a queue, a load balancer... Which are usually a very good call if you need to scale up, but which could've all been entries in your docker-compose.yml if that's all you needed.

Most importantly, and regardless of your hosting strategy, you can't just dismiss security, disaster recovery, or capacity planning. Clouds have outages and bottlenecks too, and no product can save you from human error.

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

#229

Post by lowendstock »

meatsauce wrote: post #123
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…

Where can you get a dedicated for 40?

Check https://www.lowendstock.com

Also Rasmus (of PHP) wrote a series of posts https://toys.lerdorf.com/low-cost-vps-testing a while ago comparing VPS providers in the $10/mo range.

It was discussed on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21725853

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

#230

Post by throwaway894345 »

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…

Serverless is almost always a trivial cost compared to VPS. With lambda, you get like 1M free invocations per month and the price per ms is `$0.0000000017` for 128MB on ARM.

If your endpoint takes 10ms to run and you're running it constantly for a month, it will cost you less than $0.05 (it will actually be about half of that because you get the first 1M invocations free each month, but ignoring that...).

As you point out, running RDS is more expensive, but RDS isn't serverless. You would probably want to look at DynamoDB for a serverless database, which is considerably more affordable than RDS.

Moreover, the serverless stuff is considerably easier to configure and operate than a VM.

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