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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

#271

Post by throwaway894345 »

icedchai wrote: post #268
throwaway894345 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If your lambda runs very infrequently, you'll see more cold starts which will take hundreds of ms, but warm starts are pretty easily in the single-digit milliseconds (at least for a Go lambda). If you're doing a bunch of compute or sync I/O in a loop then your functions will take longer.

But less frequent invocations are actually an even better case for Lambda versus a VPS because it suggests less wasted time (yeah, you have to pay for cold starts, but with a VPS you're paying for all of that time your service is up irrespective of whether or not it's being used).

> 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.

This is all true for a VPS as well. Assuming you care about reliability, you need to run multiple instances of your VPS behind a load balancer which implies a fair bit of networking. Moreover, you need to manage the hosts themselves, so configuring log aggregation, metrics collection, process management, SSH, deployment, hardening, etc, etc, etc.

Further still, your compute will need to communicate with the comparable services as in your lambda hypothetical, so you still need to deal with IAM and some more networking stuff. Maybe you'd say "gotcha! I would just run my databases on my VPS instances!" which is cool, but now you need to configure monitoring, backups, replication, failover, and so on for your databases versus using DynamoDB (and I would bet a lambda/dynamodb workload than the same workload on a reliable VPS/whatever-database stack).

Of course, if you're running a hobby blog or something that doesn't need reliability of scalability, then a $5 VPS is probably fine (maybe even an S3 bucket behind a CloudFront distribution, which would likely be free).

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

#272

Post by RobRivera »

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 never understood people who are in such a rush not to survey whats available.

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

#273

Post by ggktk »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #216
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.

An occasional $4K charge is negligible for a business (almost everyone is better off dealing with this sort of overrun than troubleshooting servers, all else equal ), and anyway this is a particularity of AWS CloudFront's billing protections rather than a fundamental flaw with serverless.

In most countries in the world, $4K charge is absolutely not negligible.

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

#274

Post by throwaway894345 »

jjav wrote: post #261
throwaway894345 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For batch workloads (not latency sensitive, can run at or near full capacity, etc), but most of the time Lambda is more affordable. You'll need to say more about your workload though.

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

#275

Post by GGO »

jjav wrote: post #256
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…

> To be honest I don't really understand the sentiment that developers can get away with not knowing basic sysadmin stuff and at the same time have to spend relevant amounts of time, energy and money to get up to speed with cloud solutions, k8s and so on. Agreed. I hear some saying it's nice to deploy on a lambda because you don't need to know anything about the runtime environment. But it's never quite true. As you…

Could not agree more. I have multiple VPS servers running for personal email, file storage, ci, and some side projects. Maintenance and management is really low - everything is backed up to S3 and if things go down, it will take an hour or so to restore it, but I can tolerate that kind of downtime as long as data is not lost. I think cloud platform is easier to sell once you need a robust HA.

As for performance, one of my projects can sustain 300rps which is more than enough. Sure it cannot scale automatically to thousands and millions but I don't think many projects have that requirements.

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

#276

Post by throwaway894345 »

ggktk wrote: post #273
throwaway894345 wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An occasional $4K charge is negligible for a business (almost everyone is better off dealing with this sort of overrun than troubleshooting servers, all else equal ), and anyway this is a particularity of AWS CloudFront's billing protections rather than a fundamental flaw with serverless.

In most countries in the world, $4K charge is absolutely not negligible.

I doubt this is true. If you're operating a tech company anywhere in the world, I'm guessing $4K is pretty close to negligible. In whatever case, indexing by country is misleading, "tech companies" in general is more interesting, if there are a handful of tech companies in the third world for which this doesn't hold, it doesn't invalidate the generalization.

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

#277

Post by Keyframe »

ecshafer wrote: post #191
Keyframe wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but how will you scale up your multi-dozen-users-at-the-same-time app easily then?

I think this is a joke people missed. Surely scaling multi-dozen-users-at-the-same-time was obvious enough that people didn't start talk about scaling seriously, but that's what happened. If you app has multi-dozen users, and needs to "scale" something is wrong.

Yeah, my joke didn't scale well. We did well with servers (sans cloud) and comolex apps before.. something changed in collective mindset in the meantime.

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

#278

Post by thelittleone »

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…

One benefit is compliance. If my SaaS runs on Lambda and managed DB it offloads a bunch of OS related security requirements.

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

#279

Post by bilalq »

gkapur wrote: post #177
jlmorton wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The challenge with serverless is building systems that rely on more complex backend processes and existing code and doing things like testing using most of an existing codebase. Serverless is great for nodejs/javascript stacks that are database and front-end heavy but don't need more complexity like queueing, event streaming, or more complex architectures. Then serverless becomes a huge mess normally and the develope…

I'd argue serverless handles those cases even better. SQS for queueing and Kinesis for streaming have you pretty much covered. Much easier to manage those than setting up a fleet of workers that are all long polling for messages and managing heartbeat signals or routing to a DLQ manually.

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

#280

Post by majkinetor »

jjav wrote: post #256
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…

> To be honest I don't really understand the sentiment that developers can get away with not knowing basic sysadmin stuff and at the same time have to spend relevant amounts of time, energy and money to get up to speed with cloud solutions, k8s and so on. Agreed. I hear some saying it's nice to deploy on a lambda because you don't need to know anything about the runtime environment. But it's never quite true. As you…

I couldn't agree more.

On top of that, cloud tech can't be "set and forget" because of deprecation of apis and services.

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