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Burnt $72k testing Firebase and Cloud Run and almost went bankrupt

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Re: Burnt $72k testing Firebase and Cloud Run and almost went bankrupt

#111

Post by dang »

craftinator wrote: post #81
walrus01 wrote: post #13

writing as somebody who runs a big collection of bare-metal hypervisors for ISP infrastructure purposes... this post quite honestly just makes me smirk. I have truly lost track of the numerous instances, and number of people who would be better served by buying a $1200 test/development 1U dual socket server with a few fast SSDs in it, and putting it in colocation somewhere for a few hundred dollars a month. The costs…

Prick.

Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to HN and stop breaking the site guidelines? You've been doing it a lot and we ban that sort of account. I don't want to ban you because your good comments are good, but the bad comments are like mercury: they build up in the system and poison things.

The rules apply regardless of how bad or wrong another comment is, or you feel it is.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Burnt $72k testing Firebase and Cloud Run and almost went bankrupt

#112

Post by sandGorgon »

onion2k wrote: post #3

The fact that cloud providers don't have a simple "This is how much I can afford, don't ever bill me more than that!" box on their platforms makes development a lot scarier than it really needs to be.

Google does have this feature https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/budgets-program...

Here's the specific example https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/notify#cap_disa...

Re: Burnt $72k testing Firebase and Cloud Run and almost went bankrupt

#113

Post by bpodgursky »

onion2k wrote: post #3

The fact that cloud providers don't have a simple "This is how much I can afford, don't ever bill me more than that!" box on their platforms makes development a lot scarier than it really needs to be.

There are some cloud services where it's not quite this simple.

S3 -- you can't just delete customer data because they hit a billing limit

RDS -- not going to drop databases on the 27th of the month

Anything with persistent data is going to have to stay alive and accumulate costs. Admittedly these services aren't where the crazy bills come from, but it does make a simple kill switch a bit more complex.

Re: Burnt $72k testing Firebase and Cloud Run and almost went bankrupt

#114

Post by thanksforthe42 »

mikestew wrote: post #100
onion2k wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They want to suck the maximum money from consumers before they realize. I have very little money so I just don't use their services because a mistake would be disastrous. They might be losing out on me making a unicorn app on their platform. It's unlikely, but while the possibility of catastrophe exists I'll stick to not using them. That extends to not recommending anyone uses them either in case the worst happens.

I have very little money... Then the harsh reality is: companies don't care. Yeah, your app might turn out to be a unicorn, but the overwhelming odds are that it won't. And no one cares that you'll tell your other broke friends to avoid the service. We'd all like to think it to be different, that a company might care about appeasing my broke ass. But as already pointed out, they want the whales. I also wonder, despit…

Meanwhile this leaves an opportunity for a different company to provide these services.

I do my best to avoid FAANG giants who don't think about me.

Re: Burnt $72k testing Firebase and Cloud Run and almost went bankrupt

#115

Post by Closi »

jasonpeacock wrote: post #102
onion2k wrote: post #3

The fact that cloud providers don't have a simple "This is how much I can afford, don't ever bill me more than that!" box on their platforms makes development a lot scarier than it really needs to be.

It's surprisingly complex to do that. Let's take a simple example and say your cloud account is doing 2 things - compute & storage. Compute is an active resource, when you exceed your budget it can be automatically shutdown. Storage is a passive resource, when you exceed your budget it can be automatically....deleted? That's almost always the wrong action. Providing fine-grained cost limits help some, as passive reso…

It's almost like you could make it configurable so users can choose what happens if they go over, and to what extent.

Re: Burnt $72k testing Firebase and Cloud Run and almost went bankrupt

#116

Post by thanksforthe42 »

akh wrote: post #78
scrollaway wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS pricing is not obscure, it's just not for you. So in that sense, you are correct to not see a reason to move to the cloud, but your advice does not apply to everyone. And I don't believe they make "more money" that way at all. AWS margins are either very low or very high, and the higher margins and prices tend to be the "simpler" ones: packaged, managed products such as Redshift that are billed on fewer tiers and…

How do you take pricing into your design considerations? Does it come with experience from using an AWS service in production and understanding how it's priced, combined with the usage numbers the new system might get? I'm trying to learn more about how engineers currently do this.

Calling programmers "Engineers" is a misnomer.

I wish programmers had the prestige it deserved for combining Science, tradition, authority, and art.

Engineers are not allowed to use tradition, authority or art. They are restricted to being modern day calculators.

Nothing is wrong with either.

Re: Burnt $72k testing Firebase and Cloud Run and almost went bankrupt

#117

Post by [deleted] »

scrollaway wrote: post #70
nojito wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS's margin is currently 30+% which is massive. >AWS pricing is not obscure There is a massive secondary consulting market because of AWS's price obscurities.

The margin is absolutely not the same across all products. > There is a massive secondary consulting market because of AWS's price obscurities. Its. Not. For. You. AWS pricing is a part of your design. With some exceptions (that you aren't talking about), they charge you more for using more resources. You are forced to design systems that use less resources if you want to optimize your bill. That consulting market is…

[deleted]

Re: Burnt $72k testing Firebase and Cloud Run and almost went bankrupt

#118

Post by Closi »

klohto wrote: post #75
nojito wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS's margin is currently 30+% which is massive. >AWS pricing is not obscure There is a massive secondary consulting market because of AWS's price obscurities.

> There is a massive secondary consulting market because of AWS's price obscurities. While that's true, there is consulting market for most things that are complicated. Doesn't mean they are shady. It's simply not for you. You are welcome either to dive in or get a consultant. I promise you though, that AWS pricing isn't difficult once you understand few concepts and know your way around the Cost Explorer. With prope…

> While that's true, there is consulting market for most things that are complicated. Doesn't mean they are shady.

It does mean it's not simple though.

Re: Burnt $72k testing Firebase and Cloud Run and almost went bankrupt

#119

Post by treeman79 »

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #96
donmcronald wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my worst nightmare. Lol. I guess now is a great time to give Azure a shoutout for sitting on their hands for 8 years without so much as a response to the community for half a decade [1]. At least AWS allows using a prepaid credit card so they’ll need to call me if things go haywire. I bet if that $72k charge went through it would have been much harder to get out of. “Sorry, we don’t have the money” is a much…

> “Sorry, we don’t have the money” is a much better negotiating position than “can we please have our money back?” I agree but why would you like to be in either position anyway? The so-called cloud services are terribly overpriced when compared to traditional servers.

Done correctly they save a lot of IT time.

Seem companies hire five 6 figure people to try and cut amazon bill by a couple of grand a month.

Never understood spending 50-100k a month to maybe save 5k

Re: Burnt $72k testing Firebase and Cloud Run and almost went bankrupt

#120

Post by kerng »

This is really scary. It's so unpredictable what one actually has to pay, especially for a small business moving to the cloud is much more challenging then it should be.

When creating resources it's really unclear what one might be charged, then there are saving plans and pre-commitment options and so forth.

Might be a good startup idea, basically just sell cloud resources via a simple, predictable payment model.

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