I got pwned by my cloud costs • Hacker News Board

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#151

Post by dx034 » Mon, Jan 24, 2022, 10:19 AM UTC

octoberfranklin wrote: post #126

omegalulw wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The direction is opposite IMO. As you grow bigger on prem starts making a lot more sense.

I think the case is for big companies that have a hard time attracting IT talent. Like, not in an even remotely IT-related industry, and their headquarters is in a city with no significant tech community. Places that scream "working here will not improve your resume". I'm a major cloud skeptic, but there's a certain class of giant enterprisey companies that are never going to be able to attract good IT talent, and if…

I believe renting dedicated servers is often overlooked. You pay someone else to install hardware, ensure network connections and be on-site for hardware swaps etc but still have the maximum degree of flexibility.

Even larger companies can work well with that model, traffic also tends to be cheap enough that you can spread across different vendors to avoid lock-in. And in that case, your sysadmins can sit wherever they want, no need to be physically close to the servers.

Also, as there's much less knowledge to be a dedicated server provider, competition is strong and prices are comparably low.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#152

Post by traceroute66 » Mon, Jan 24, 2022, 10:22 AM UTC

Dave3of5 wrote: post #77

Ah the old cloud provider switcheroo. Yip this is the way they make money. They make it easy to setup some gigantic hugely scalable website then hit you with a gigantic scaled up bill. AWS would do this as well. Team I'm in at the moment is in the early stages of cloud adoption but the company in total has fell hook line and sinker for AWS. When I mentioned the cost there is always an excuse. The main one being that…

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#153

Post by hrrsn » Mon, Jan 24, 2022, 10:22 AM UTC

hardwaresofton wrote: post #143

dx034 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But he could've put static files on a Hetzner server and still have his backend in Azure. That would've solved these issues and probably saved even more money.

Being able to run a relatively simple global cache with a cheap provider like Hetzner has the origin is also harder than it should have to be.

  apt install nginx

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#154

Post by dx034 » Mon, Jan 24, 2022, 10:22 AM UTC

hardwaresofton wrote: post #143

dx034 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But he could've put static files on a Hetzner server and still have his backend in Azure. That would've solved these issues and probably saved even more money.

Being able to run a relatively simple global cache with a cheap provider like Hetzner has the origin is also harder than it should have to be.

How's that? Setting up a revers nginx proxy with cache takes probably less than an hour even if you've never done it (speaking from experience). And otherwise, if the files don't change that much just ssh in, copy them on the server and serve them via nginx and cloudflare tunnel?

I'm in no way a sysadmin and have set up these configurations manually in less than an hour for side projects. Cloudflare tunnel also allows you to lock down the server for everything but ssh with pubkey auth so the attack surface is really small.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#155

Post by dx034 » Mon, Jan 24, 2022, 10:23 AM UTC

sildur wrote: post #137

fuzzy2 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That dedicated server you have to manage (ensure security, install the software you need, keep it updated and secure etc). It’s not for everyone. Also, as you can see in a screenshot on TFA: Some services are simply dirt cheap. The storage account and its various “sub-services” is such a thing. It’s hard to compete with dedicated hardware here. Depending on your dedicated hosting provider, the traffic cost trap exist…

> That dedicated server you have to manage (ensure security, install the software you need, keep it updated and secure etc). It’s not for everyone. apt install unattended-upgrades. And Hetzner's firewall.

And cloudflare tunnel which allows you to block even ports 80 and 443. The only attack vector is then through ssh but with passwords disabled I wouldn't worry too much about that.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#156

Post by alkonaut » Mon, Jan 24, 2022, 10:25 AM UTC

Cloud providers should always have a max spend and it should be a standard feature. The cap shouldn't even be some optional feature or notification service. It should be a hard cap that you can move - at your own risk.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#157

Post by sudhirj » Mon, Jan 24, 2022, 10:28 AM UTC

This particular problem basically boils down to "CDN providers don't like caching large files", which is a very common problem. Everything else was configured and setup exactly right to not have a large bill.

Most CDN providers have a lot of machines out on the edges of their networks, and it's understandable that they don't stuff these machines with large disks, likely preferring smaller faster SSDs. But this is a very common pitfall of CDNs that needs more attention, along with messaging on the dashboards and settings pages.

I've had problems with no warning on Cloudfront, Cloudflare, Bunny.net all from not realising that my files were beyond the CDN's cache size limit, but none of them seem to do a good job at surfacing this other than "talk to customer support".

Cloudfront does list the max size clearly in the limits and quotas page, though, and if you front your S3 bucket with Cloudfront, you could turn caching off and still get the discounted bandwidth out rates (S3 -> Cloudfront is always free, even if the file is fetched every time).

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#158

Post by patrec » Mon, Jan 24, 2022, 10:32 AM UTC

zzt123 wrote: post #18

Interestingly, Troy says that egress is expensive on Azure at $0.014 AUD/gB (~$0.010 USD/gB), but that is the same price as additional egress for Linode and DO, and Linode egress has never struck me as expensive. In fact, I’m kind of shocked (as an AWS user) that Azure egress is the same price as Linode. Actually, wow it seems AWS is also the same price as Linode and DO for egress. While Linodes and DO do come with d…

How can $10 per TB not strike you as expensive? You can easily download that much a day on consumer broadband that will cost you far less than $10/day.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#159

Post by fendy3002 » Mon, Jan 24, 2022, 10:33 AM UTC

Dave3of5 wrote: post #86

tpetry wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every cloud makes this mistake easy! You have to manually activate billing alerts for everyone because they want you to spend more snd more each month. I am still waiting for a cloud without these dark patterns. But that will never happen because it‘s leaving a big amount of money on the table by not being hostile.

Also the billing alerts is just that an alert. They should have something in place to put a hard cap on monthly spend. That way his free website would go offline when he's spent > $X. As you say they make it hard deliberately. Edit: Turn out Azure have this: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cost-management-billi...

Eh after skimming it I feel like there's still gotchas with it. Not every account can turn it on and looks like there aren't custom limit.

CMIIW, it'll be my first cloud provider if I can set one.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#160

Post by adrianN » Mon, Jan 24, 2022, 10:33 AM UTC

omegalulw wrote: post #111

bennyp101 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's not cool, and won't make your CV sparkle. I'm sure there becomes a point where cost of (hardware + maintenance + staffing) > (cloud + staffing), in which case sure crack on. But like you, I'll stick to a rented server for my stuff.

The direction is opposite IMO. As you grow bigger on prem starts making a lot more sense.

There is a size where on prem would be much cheaper on paper, but internal red tape for access to internal resources is such that teams are unnecessarily slowed down. For example I once worked at a place where it took several months to get an additional on-prem box to speed up our CI pipeline. Of course you can also add that amount of red tape to a cloud solution, but in my experience it's easier to get approval for an additional EC2 box.