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Tell HN: I DDoSed myself using CloudFront and Lambda Edge and got a $4.5k bill
321–330 of 348 posts
Re: Tell HN: I DDoSed myself using CloudFront and Lambda Edge and got a $4.5k bill
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
Buy more servers, loadbalance, and don't take the short painful route architecture-wise? It isn't really that hard.
There is a point where that becomes exponentially prohibitively expensive. At a former startup where I worked as senior engineer, that was our original approach. Then one weekend we tripled our userbase and horizontally scaling required massive changes in database architecture, sharding solutions, etc. "Just buy more servers and load balance" is the short painful route. Carefully planning out and taking advantage of…
>Then one weekend we tripled our userbase and horizontally scaling required massive changes in database architecture, sharding solutions, etc.
You took the short easy route out of the gate instead of building for what you were planning to handle. This is the opposite of what I espouse. If you were going about it my way, you build that in from the ground up. Harder and a bit bumpier to roll out from the get go, but has worked well for me in the past.
Re: Tell HN: I DDoSed myself using CloudFront and Lambda Edge and got a $4.5k bill
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
In SMB companies around the world "an occasional $4K charge" is definitely not negliable.
Re: Tell HN: I DDoSed myself using CloudFront and Lambda Edge and got a $4.5k bill
#324At work, my development team is contracted with a company that uses AWS, and for better or worse, we have also become the devops team. We have been burned by AWS before, and we have a rule of thumb: if you are deploying new functionality/service communication, after deploy, monitor for 10-15 minutes, with a wide enough window to see if there is a noticable/unexpected change from before the deploy. It always feels lik…
> if you are deploying new functionality/service communication, after deploy, monitor for 10-15 minutes, with a wide enough window to see if there is a noticable/unexpected change from before the deploy. It always feels like wasted/burned time, but better to waste time than money. ... have you considered automating this? Alarms are pretty straight forward across all cloud platforms. Since you're using AWS: CloudWatch…
We have alarms, but things like cloudwatch can be up to 5 minutes before an alarm goes off.
Re: Tell HN: I DDoSed myself using CloudFront and Lambda Edge and got a $4.5k bill
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, cold starts are definitely a problem. One of the advantages of VPSes is its all hot, ready to go, obviously. You pay for that performance, for that lower latency, and I'm fine with that. My big problem with lambda / serverless is the developer experience is pretty awful. The time between making a change, deploying, and seeing the result of that change is slow. You can work around this (with tools like localstack…
Yeah, it depends on the application. If you're very latency sensitive, then you'll probably want to keep your lambda warm or just pay more for VPS. But the original context was cost, not latency. > My big problem with lambda / serverless is the developer experience is pretty awful. The time between making a change, deploying, and seeing the result of that change is slow. You can work around this (with tools like loca…
I personally have not had a lot of problems with local lambda development. However, when assisting coworkers, I often see problems where dependencies aren't packaged properly (lambda layers), permissions are missing, code is not properly modularized (everything in one big handler file), people editing code live on AWS to debug problems they can't replicate locally, etc.
Re: Tell HN: I DDoSed myself using CloudFront and Lambda Edge and got a $4.5k bill
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amen. I've consulted for companies that went all in on AWS Lambda + AWS SQS, only to transition them to an EC2 instance that performs the same computations at a fraction of the cost. No — you do not need K8 on day one.
But managed K8s is so easy to setup and makes life and the development cycle so much easier you're basically robbing yourself if you don't. I assume you just dropped a shit ton of features on your move to that EC2 instance unless of course you wasted more time then it would take to get everything working better on Lambda/SQS.
The actual compute is decoupled from the CI/CD pipeline. Moving to an EC2 instance does not preclude us from leveraging Lambda and other technologies.
Re: Tell HN: I DDoSed myself using CloudFront and Lambda Edge and got a $4.5k bill
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
In SMB companies around the world "an occasional $4K charge" is definitely not negliable.
Again, we’re not talking about SMBs, we’re talking about tech companies generally. (What share of SMBs are there doing serverless or with any cloud footprint at all?)
Re: Tell HN: I DDoSed myself using CloudFront and Lambda Edge and got a $4.5k bill
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
For 99% of projects you're never going to hit the point a single server (or group of servers if you truly need redundancy for some level of uptime) can't handle the load. For the other 1% that end up needing that scale I have a hard time accepting it's actually better to start building for massive scale day 1 instead of day 1000.
Sure, but not all of us are working at tiny startups or on personal projects. Many of us here work for large companies that have real scale already and are trying to solve those problems. Why does everyone assume everyone else works at tiny startups?
At that point you're already at day 1000 and already know what scale you need for the project so none of this conversation is relevant. You already have hit the point you need to build it a certain way.
I've never worked at a startup, until last year I never worked at a company with less than 100k employees.
Re: Tell HN: I DDoSed myself using CloudFront and Lambda Edge and got a $4.5k bill
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. Mo…
> 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.
I guess I don't really see the appeal of putting a hobby project into a space where a simple mistake can literally cost you thousands of dollars, with very little recourse.
I get to play with the vast majority of the fun tech - I just choose to do it on a k8s cluster I own, with extremely predictable costs, and frankly - more scaling capacity than I think most businesses need.
> 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.
And this isn't really my stance - I'm absolutely not advocating for a single dedicated server (fuck - even my hobby instance is HA, 3 machines with a network lb, on a 5 hour UPS, with a redundant network. I personally don't care as much about the redundant network, but comcast provides it free to business customers in my area anyways through 5g equipment).
But I do think most (and I mean 75%+) businesses can spend 10k on a single server rack and go for literal years without problems.
If your business is not selling software as a service - don't buy into the bullshit marketing.
Even if your business is selling software as a service, think about it first. Small businesses tend to get sweetheart deals on costs in AWS, GCP, and Azure because their usage costs for those companies amortizes out to roughly zero, and because they know damn well that they'll end up paying through the nose if they make it to mid-size (or even just screw up once or twice - two fuck ups like the one here and you'd have bought yourself a decent server rack!)
Re: Tell HN: I DDoSed myself using CloudFront and Lambda Edge and got a $4.5k bill
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
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???
Storage, compute and networking mostly. I'm confused by your question - are you suggesting that early stage startups couldn't possible generate a workload to warrant that cost? Maybe if your idea of a startup business is limited to running a basic CRUD app. But other data-intensive projects have engineering needs that can easily reach that scale, especially in the early days when you're trying to bootstrap your data catalog or ML models or whatever.