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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

#261

Post by jjav »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #230
peterangular wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 poin…

> Serverless is almost always a trivial cost compared to VPS.

Not my experience. Our AWS lambda cost is close to $1K/month and the usage isn't that much so we could easily host this on a few (for redundancy) of the smallish VPS instances for far less money.

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

#262

Post by rob_c »

huksley wrote: post #185
mfrye0 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a side note, I don't know if you've already acquired any AWS credits. If not, Product Hunt Founders Club is a decent deal that will give you $5k in AWS credits. Between that and the no Stripe fees for 1 year, it paid for itself in no time. https://www.producthunt.com/founder-club

Thank you! I recently applied for AWS Activate credits because our startup was a part of YCombinator Startup School recently.

No post body was provided.

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

#263

Post by jjav »

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…

> I would like to suggest to you that Serverless _is_ kind of boring

It's not my kind of boring, although I sort of see what you're saying.

It presents a simple facade, but it's built on complex infrastructure you have no way to have any visibility into. So when things go wrong it's a nightmare.

To me boring tech means super simple, KISS to the extreme. Something I can diagnose fully when necessary without any layers of complexity (let alone proprietary complexity I can't access) standing in the way.

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

#264

Post by oznog »

s1k3s wrote: post #169

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.

In 2010 I served a peak a million users per hour with an $80 dedicated server managed at my pleasure with Plesk and my PHP framework.

I can respond up to 20k requests per second.

Scaling is for worldwide TOP 250 webs or webs designed according to the stupid contemporary fashions.

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

#266

Post by icedchai »

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…

You'd be surprised. I've worked at many startups and mid-sized companies. You don't actually "need" to do most of those things. I've did a consulting job for a company with 100's of millions in revenue that didn't patch its servers for years. One had a 1400 day uptime!

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

#267

Post by Mo3 »

horsawlarway wrote: post #226
Mo3 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I realize, but I still disagree with one of your points:

> 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.

And I don't even disagree with it for its inherent correctness, but because nobody ever said you absolutely have AWS for something that doesn't need it. Most users here tend to discard cloud platforms for even the most obvious and suitable use-cases, and keep on iterating how their single dedicated server can do all of it. I'm also not a big fan of telling someone they don't need to use AWS if it's clearly a side hobby project because that is how we all learned.. by playing with cool modern technology for fun.

The real issue is super simple.. AWS just needs a hard cap functionality so stuff like this can't happen.

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

#268

Post by icedchai »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #230
peterangular wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 poin…

A 10ms invocation sounds like a myth. I've certainly never seen one that low for a lambda that actually does anything. All the serverless stuff I've worked with (mostly in Python) operates slower than a CGI script. 100's of milliseconds minimum. When your serverless endpoint needs to integrate with other AWS services, the configuration can get complicated fast. VPC endpoints, IAM roles, security groups... it goes on and on.

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

#269

Post by Mo3 »

drbawb wrote: post #243
Mo3 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How's that bad? Isn't this how we all learned? By playing with cool modern technology?

I feel like learning how to configure bird, bind, haproxy, rdbms clusters, redundant MXs, etc. has taught me far more than spinning up equivalent virtual infrastructure on a public cloud would have. Getting to play with the underlying FOSS technologies is far more rewarding to me than using the commercialized versions on someone else's stack. Plus it helps me evaluate and architect my products for competing clouds, r…

> I feel like learning how to configure bird, bind, haproxy, rdbms clusters, redundant MXs, etc. has taught me far more than spinning up equivalent virtual infrastructure on a public cloud would have.

I agree with this, but the choice of what other individuals play with is not ours to make. There's still countless of youngsters working on bare metal, for whatever it's worth, they just grow up in a world with a lot of existing abstractions now.

> Assuming we're talking about side-projects/hobbyist development: when I'm doing that I want as few variable expenses as possible, and they usually don't require the purported benefits of the cloud. If such a project needs to scale: I'll bolt it onto a cloud at that point, or sprinkle in specific services to address the pain points.

100%, but the choice is free for anyone themselves to make. OP is furthering his knowledge and experience in a very specialised and highly sought after sector. Maybe he'll come to the same conclusion at some point, or maybe he comes from bare metal and has different perspectives now and thinks that redundancy is always awesome.

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

#270

Post by drdaeman »

icedchai wrote: post #266
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…

You'd be surprised. I've worked at many startups and mid-sized companies. You don't actually "need" to do most of those things. I've did a consulting job for a company with 100's of millions in revenue that didn't patch its servers for years. One had a 1400 day uptime!

> didn't patch its servers for years. One had a 1400 day uptime

Well, this isn't exactly the best practice to follow - but, yes, this is very common, and it works (until someone finds that there's a vulnerability to exploit). So, from a purely practical perspective - software updates are certainly not a hard requirement, one can do quite well without them (just be aware about the risks).

Anyway, there are many fairly age-tested solutions for updating software on the fly, live kernel patching and live network sockets included.

And a lot of cloud software updates (e.g. managed databases) incur noticeable downtime so you need a failover (and appropriate software design that can survive it). But then you can do the very same thing with two servers, no cloud magic necessary.

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