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Deploy your side-projects at scale for basically nothing – Google Cloud Run

alexolivier.me

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Re: Deploy your side-projects at scale for basically nothing – Google Cloud Run

#161

Post by matsz »

abootstrapper wrote: post #152
matsz wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloud hosting is great for businesses, that's why I believe that every web developer should experiment with those services. It's not great for personal use for the reasons you've stated - the risk of your service going down due to it being viral is much easier to bear than the risk of having to pay outrageous amounts of money for those services in that event. If your hobby project goes down for a while nobody will re…

Years ago I ran a side project that went viral. It grew to 60k visitors a day and my monthly cloud expenses were around $1,500. I cannot fathom a scenario where you get a surprise $100k bill from a viral hit. Anytime my project went down due to scaling, it was painful. You don’t get many chances at going viral.

You're right. I've went with the $100k assumption from the other comment.

Re: Deploy your side-projects at scale for basically nothing – Google Cloud Run

#162

Post by [deleted] »

jjeaff wrote: post #150

This article fails to mention the issue of needing a database. It doesn't matter how seamlessly your application can scale if your data backend won't scale with it. They mention Cloud SQL, which is of course instance based and would run into scaling issues if your app got suddenly hammered. Not to mention, the cost isn't $0 if your app gets 0 traffic, you are going to have to pay to keep that running around the clock…

[deleted]

Re: Deploy your side-projects at scale for basically nothing – Google Cloud Run

#163

Post by franciscop »

abootstrapper wrote: post #152
matsz wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloud hosting is great for businesses, that's why I believe that every web developer should experiment with those services. It's not great for personal use for the reasons you've stated - the risk of your service going down due to it being viral is much easier to bear than the risk of having to pay outrageous amounts of money for those services in that event. If your hobby project goes down for a while nobody will re…

Years ago I ran a side project that went viral. It grew to 60k visitors a day and my monthly cloud expenses were around $1,500. I cannot fathom a scenario where you get a surprise $100k bill from a viral hit. Anytime my project went down due to scaling, it was painful. You don’t get many chances at going viral.

60k is on the low-end of visits only from HN where I've normally seen 100k+. I saw around 60k once of 4-5 of my projects hitting the front-page.

Also I know I make mistakes, both at coding and at setting things up, which can easily trash things around and make a 10x-100x multiplier for the cost. The risk is small, but the consequences are horrible so I prefer to avoid this risk.

Edit: also note that even a $10k would be horrifying to spend in most personal projects, and $1500 is more than what most programmers are saving monthly in most of the world.

Re: Deploy your side-projects at scale for basically nothing – Google Cloud Run

#164

Post by swiley »

franciscop wrote: post #105

I have used it for work-related reasons and indeed the service is quite nice. But I don't use Google Cloud Run for personal projects for two reasons: - No way of limiting the expenses AFAIK. I don't want the possibility of having a huge bill on my name that I cannot pay. This unfortunately applies to other clouds. - The risk of being locked out. For many, many reasons (including the above), you can get locked out of…

> No way of limiting the expenses

This pattern seems common among business people: things working in the common case vs things working in corner cases, it’s how you end up with consumer windows running critical machines. I’m always shocked and moderately disturbed when I see it but I guess we all need to accept the reality that most people are very pragmatic. It makes sense, most people’s intuition comes from “the real material world” where you have to pragmatic, I think many of them fail to realize that on a computer you don’t have to give up certainty the way you do in “the real world.”

Re: Deploy your side-projects at scale for basically nothing – Google Cloud Run

#165

Post by cheriot »

franciscop wrote: post #144
cheriot wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article: > The service will create more and more instances of your application up to the limit you defined The Cloud Run docs confirm an instance maximum can be set and the price per instance can be less than $5/month.

Cost is not only based on the number of instances. From a quick search: https://www.jhanley.com/google-cloud-run-pricing/ Understanding the cost of these services is not easy at all, especially for extreme cases/situations. And a calculator/estimator won't fix the problem. That is why I love the fixed $X/month where there's no room for surprises.

I hope GCP/AWS add a max spend ability. Until then it's complexity of pricing model vs time spent on OS and database management. To each their own.

Re: Deploy your side-projects at scale for basically nothing – Google Cloud Run

#166

Post by deanmoriarty »

franciscop wrote: post #105

I have used it for work-related reasons and indeed the service is quite nice. But I don't use Google Cloud Run for personal projects for two reasons: - No way of limiting the expenses AFAIK. I don't want the possibility of having a huge bill on my name that I cannot pay. This unfortunately applies to other clouds. - The risk of being locked out. For many, many reasons (including the above), you can get locked out of…

I had the same thoughts: even if I like Google Cloud a lot (I use it extensively at work), I don’t feel it’s safe for me to use it at home, since I don’t want to risk having my entire google account locked due to “suspicious activity”, whatever that might mean.

In fact, I recently shut down a personal App Engine service I had been using for myself for a few years just because of this paranoia. The service was not doing anything illegal, just crawling a few websites (forums, ...) I like and sending me emails when there are interesting updates. But you never know if they might determine my outbound traffic is suspicious. I also started the long process of moving my main email from a @gmail.com to a @custom.domain that currently forwards to gmail, just in case I get locked out.

It is quite bizzarre that this is the reputation google gained for themselves.

Re: Deploy your side-projects at scale for basically nothing – Google Cloud Run

#167

Post by ignoramous »

asdfasdfgdy wrote: post #118
all_factz wrote: post #35

What’s the advantage of GCR over AWS Fargate/ECS? I’ve been running an app on ECS for a couple months now and have been pretty happy with the ease of set-up, load-balancing, auto-scaling etc, though there are still kinks I’m figuring out (SSHing into containers to perform database management, for example, or deploying updated tasks without downtime). Is the main selling point of GCR just its price? I haven’t found EC…

Disclaimer: I work on cloud run Another advantage not stated by others is that cloud run (mostly) adheres to the KNative API spec. This allows you lift-and-shift your application from cloud run to a Kubernetes cluster with the KNative plugin installed, a feature you can’t find with any other serverless product

Thanks. What are the usual cold start and warm start times for Cloud Run? Is there potential for those start times to go down to a few milliseconds in the near-future?

Re: Deploy your side-projects at scale for basically nothing – Google Cloud Run

#168

Post by spookthesunset »

arama471 wrote: post #160
spookthesunset wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A “cap” feature isn’t as easy to implement as you’d think. What happens when you hit the cap? Does it start shutting down instances? If yes, which ones and in what order? And don’t say “I don’t care” because you do care—you are allowing your provider to basically cause an outage in your service. If you do allow some kind of ordered shutdown of service, what is the UX going to look like? What is the API going to look…

Why not allow people to set a cap that disables everything set to that billing method once it's been reached? That seems to be the use case that people are saying is missing from cloud offerings.

Yeah after I posted I realized that once you hit your cap, that’s it you are done.

Still, I bet there is a lot of companies that might be more upset with the provider shutting everything down even if they had set up a cap.

Re: Deploy your side-projects at scale for basically nothing – Google Cloud Run

#169

Post by franciscop »

cheriot wrote: post #165
franciscop wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cost is not only based on the number of instances. From a quick search: https://www.jhanley.com/google-cloud-run-pricing/ Understanding the cost of these services is not easy at all, especially for extreme cases/situations. And a calculator/estimator won't fix the problem. That is why I love the fixed $X/month where there's no room for surprises.

I hope GCP/AWS add a max spend ability. Until then it's complexity of pricing model vs time spent on OS and database management. To each their own.

I use Heroku for these situations where everything is managed automatically. The only con here would be paying more, $20-50/m (Node.js+DB+Redis?) instead of $5/m for DO, but I'm happy to pay for that and spend no time on manual management.

Re: Deploy your side-projects at scale for basically nothing – Google Cloud Run

#170

Post by jccooper »

alasdair_ wrote: post #142

I wont use this for the simple reason that I bought into the Google Appengine stack in the past and it really bit me for several reasons: They force-upgraded the java version. The problem was their their own libraries didn’t work with the new version and we had to rewrite a ton of code. It ended up being insanely expensive at scale. We were totally locked-in to their system and the way it did things. This would be fi…

App Engine is indeed problematic. I have an important app on it and various forced upgrades gave me a big headache. It's been stable for several years now, so I'm okay with it, but as much as I like the idea, and indeed the execution, of App Engine I'm not going to do anything new on it because of the lock-in factors.

Cloud Run, however, uses standard containers, so as long as you don't use Google proprietary stuff on the backend it's relatively easy to move. As the article mentions, it's useful for low-traffic projects, and if they pick up you can move them to full-time instances.

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