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Rubygems.org AWS bill for Feb 2014 [pdf]

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Re: Rubygems.org AWS bill for Feb 2014 [pdf]

#121
post #50

I thought I'd answer some of your questions, as the person that pays the bill. 1. This can be cheaper on AWS. We've been meaning to move to reserve instances, paying a year at a time, for a while and simply haven't done it yet. 2. Fastly has already donate CDN usage to us, but we haven't fully utilized it yet as we're (slowly) sort out some issues between primary gem serving and the bundler APIs. 3. RubyCentral pays…

Hey Evan, as with Rubyforge the last 7-odd years, you'd be welcome to a free account on Bytemark's UK cloud platform bigv.io, or dedicated servers, or a mix on the same VLAN. We're a Ruby shop ourselves, and we host a fair chunk of Debian in our data centre too these days (https://www.debian.org/News/2013/20130404). I So just drop me a line if that's of interest .

I assume this was posted because it's an enormous bill :) but obviously if you're happy with it, carry on!

Re: Rubygems.org AWS bill for Feb 2014 [pdf]

#122
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We aren't paying that much in cut just yet. We're a small team (6 engineers in total). You don't have to be pulling in millions per week to get high on the grossing charts. We're probably around 1/4 of what you estimated. Though you mention delivering the assets. Actually (like a lot of games) we make a big effort in getting under 50MB over-the-air limit on the App Store. The total content for retina iPhone is ~300MB…

FYI, the OTA limit was increased to 100MB back in September. We're managing to squeeze our apps into this at the moment, but will likely need a similar solution using S3/CloudFront in the near future. [1] http://www.macrumors.com/2013/09/18/apple-increases-over-the...

We support non retina devices, which are stuck on iOS 6. When this came out we weren't sure whether it applied to that too, so stuck with 50. We'd already been keeping it under 50 for 6 months by then so we had all the infrastructure set up, its mostly automated.

Haven't looked at it since iOS 7 launch though, do you know if it was iOS 6 too?

Re: Rubygems.org AWS bill for Feb 2014 [pdf]

#123
post #107
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the price is bandwidth. They are effectively being reamed by using CloudFront instead of negotiating a better rate with a "real" CDN (which will also give then much better performance, as CloudFront doesn't have many edge locations). (Although, actually, while I verified their total dollars spent is greater than what would be required to get a fundamentally better deal on bandwidth, I didn't take into consid…

CloudFront doesn't have many edge locations This is nonsense. They have more edge locations than most. I didn't try all comparators in the list, but out of half of them I tried, none had more than Cloudfront: http://www.cdnplanet.com/compare/cloudfront/maxcdn/ So if Cloudfront has 'not many', who has 'many', and how many is that?

MaxCDN is a very low-end "CDN". If you can buy your account from the website without talking to an account manager, and the plans are as low as $9/month, you should not expect a lot of performance, features, locations, etc.: what you should, however, expect is "cheap"... MaxCDN is appropriately cheap.

To look at something more reasonable: CDNetworks is realistic competition; they are strong in Asia, and were the people I was comparing the pricing to (so they aren't going to be horribly expensive). According to the comparison website you are using, they have almost four times as many edge locations.

http://www.cdnplanet.com/compare/cloudfront/cdnetworks/

Honestly, though, the reality is that the really great CDNs don't even have data on this website (even for CDNetworks I think this data is not accurate: looks like an approximation): the leaders in this space are Akamai and Limelight, and both just show "Not Available" for the number of edge nodes they have.

Even going a little lower on the CDN pecking list, though: Level3, which according to this website you are using is mostly "competitive" with CloudFront (sometimes actually worse) in the regions CloudFront bothers to cover, is clearly covering entire subcontinents where CloudFront has nothing.

The reality is that CloudFront is still trying to grow out a network: they have poor coverage in Europe (which is pretty key), a few nodes in Japan/Singapore, and then next to no coverage anywhere else. Yet, they insist on pricing their product as if they were a big player (12c/GB is Akamai-level expensive).

(So, do I get to condescendingly say "this is nonsense" now? I mean, seriously: you clearly didn't spend much time using this website and you didn't look into who the leaders are to verify you weren't comparing low-end to low-end... also, I think you are not appreciating that 0->2 is infinitely better ;P.)

Re: Rubygems.org AWS bill for Feb 2014 [pdf]

#124
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI, the OTA limit was increased to 100MB back in September. We're managing to squeeze our apps into this at the moment, but will likely need a similar solution using S3/CloudFront in the near future. [1] http://www.macrumors.com/2013/09/18/apple-increases-over-the...

We support non retina devices, which are stuck on iOS 6. When this came out we weren't sure whether it applied to that too, so stuck with 50. We'd already been keeping it under 50 for 6 months by then so we had all the infrastructure set up, its mostly automated. Haven't looked at it since iOS 7 launch though, do you know if it was iOS 6 too?

Just checked with a couple folks here, the limit is for the iTunes store, and therefore was also raised for iOS 6 (we assume older versions as well, but don't support them either).

Re: Rubygems.org AWS bill for Feb 2014 [pdf]

#125
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever anybody makes this type of statement, I'm alway interested in knowing if they've ever run a site with this type of traffic, and this many customers. In particular, have you ever run a site that consistently serves over 25 Terabytes of traffic/month, or have you worked with someone who has? I guarantee you that no company I have worked for in the last 15 years, could have ever run this type of infrastructure…

My site serves 25 TB/mo, and it costs me $80/mo... $60/mo for a dedicated server, $20/mo for CloudFlare. The dedicated server only serves 1 TB of it, the other 24 TB is static assets cached and served directly by CloudFlare. Here's a screenshot of CloudFlare Analytics for the last 30 days: http://d.pr/i/6Z8S/5GU2Ni8t

CloudFlare cannot be making money on you as a customer. $20 for 24TB is too cheap.

Re: Rubygems.org AWS bill for Feb 2014 [pdf]

#126

I had no idea it cost this much to host rubygems.org. The website says that hosting is provided by BlueBox?

This seems to be mostly their CDN bill. Not sure, but I don't really consider a CDN as part of hosting fees, more of a general infrastructure fee.

This includes all our compute fees too.

Re: Rubygems.org AWS bill for Feb 2014 [pdf]

#127
post #50

I thought I'd answer some of your questions, as the person that pays the bill. 1. This can be cheaper on AWS. We've been meaning to move to reserve instances, paying a year at a time, for a while and simply haven't done it yet. 2. Fastly has already donate CDN usage to us, but we haven't fully utilized it yet as we're (slowly) sort out some issues between primary gem serving and the bundler APIs. 3. RubyCentral pays…

Have you looked into the Rackspace Cloud offering?

Re: Rubygems.org AWS bill for Feb 2014 [pdf]

#128
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, and if you include a little Powered by AWS CloudFront i am pretty sure they could drive down the price a lot. Or, they could start talking to Fastly, I am pretty sure they can work out a much better deal while being faster.

Amazon doing anything for free for the open source community would seriously shock me.

They do spend a lot of time courting ruby/rails devs, though, so being able to say rubygems is hosted on AWS might be worth throwing them a significant discount.

Re: Rubygems.org AWS bill for Feb 2014 [pdf]

#129
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We support non retina devices, which are stuck on iOS 6. When this came out we weren't sure whether it applied to that too, so stuck with 50. We'd already been keeping it under 50 for 6 months by then so we had all the infrastructure set up, its mostly automated. Haven't looked at it since iOS 7 launch though, do you know if it was iOS 6 too?

Just checked with a couple folks here, the limit is for the iTunes store, and therefore was also raised for iOS 6 (we assume older versions as well, but don't support them either).

Interesting, thanks. Maybe next time we update, I'll try to convince everyone to panic-delete a little less :)

Re: Rubygems.org AWS bill for Feb 2014 [pdf]

#130
post #39

Right now we're a top 25 grossing iPhone game developer. The last AWS bill I saw was January's, a little under $200k. I'm not on the server team, so I don't know exactly what contributes most to it. But part of me really thinks it could be reduced!

The most interesting thing that I found about dealing with stuff at 6 figure+ scale per month on AWS was the un-advertised limits (nodes, provisioned volumes / total size, snapshots, elbs, etc) that you have to either hit, or extract from your account manager. If anyone ever ends up doing something like this; ask them upfront!

Amazon has a whole section in their documentation for the default limits. http://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/aws_service_lim...

When I've hit them, I've usually had a response to the "raise my limit" form within an hour or two.

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