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I got pwned by my cloud costs

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Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#171

Post by suction »

tolien wrote: post #168
suction wrote: post #36

I wonder if before cloud computing, has there ever been a successful product / service where it was accepted with just a shrug that the volatility of monthly costs means it could bankrupt you with next month's bill, because of complexities and opaqueness of the cost structure make it virtually impossible to predict and protect against extreme peaks in all parts of the setup. Even if you run a relatively opaque cost s…

> Even if you run a relatively opaque cost structure business like a restaurant, you can still calculate the maximum cost of ingredients for one month, the salaries, energy, etc. If the restaurant suddenly ordered ten thousand times more ingredients than usual, their supplier would probably call back and say "is that really what you want?" rather than just shrugging and shipping them tonnes of tomatoes with a bill fo…

Very true. And in terms of cloud computing, it would mean that alerts and notifications and limits are worth absolutely nothing if it's on the customer to set them up in the correct way for every scenario imaginable. Which is nearly impossible. The tomato supplier's human alerting system is a catch-all-system which would be easily implementable as well.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#172

Post by maccard »

tlamponi wrote: post #162
maccard wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To make a fair comparison you need to consider the time cost for setting all of that other stuff up compared to having it out of the box. I'd an engineer on 100k takes a week to get it up and running then your vps cost 2k to set up and 40/month going forwards.

If an engineer needs that much time you have a serious technical debt for setup of your software or a inexperienced or inept engineer. The developer or at least operators need to be able to setup your software for more frequently for testing anyway, if they cannot do that rather quick you got other problems.. I can set up Proxmox VE as hyper visor, some container for each DBs, load balancer in front and some app in a…

> If an engineer needs that much time you have a serious technical debt for setup of your software or a inexperienced or inept engineer.

Everyone does something for the first time once. Just because someone has not set up a hypervisor before doesn't mean they're inexperienced.

> I can set up Proxmox VE as hyper visor, some container for each DBs, load balancer in front and some app in about an hour max from scratch,

And I can spin up containers + load balancer on AWS in less than five minutes. That doesn't mean that it's just an easy thing to do. (although, this specific example is).

> upfront setup and frequent maintenance is naturally something you need to price in. the cloud offer may not really be your salvation and just delay the fall while costing all the more.

Agreed 100% on both counts.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#173

Post by pid-1 »

lpcvoid wrote: post #56

Can somebody explain to me why I wouldn't just rent a 40 EUR dedicated server from Hetzner with unlimited traffic and gigabit uplink? His 600GB/day is way less than what you get over a gigabit link within a day. Sure, sudden bursts would perhaps "throttle" at a gigabit, but according to his article that was only the cloudflare proxy anyhow, so no pain in having that take a few seconds longer. As far as I am concerned…

I have a few dozens of personal projects on AWS using APIGW, Lambda, CloudFront, Dynamo DB and S3.

Their monthly cost is something between 0 and a few cents.

Stuff like Hertzner is fine, but if you know your way around AWS you realize have massive cost savings. Prob the same for Azure.

Finally, in many places 40 EUR for a pet project is actually a lot of money.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#174

Post by ihateolives »

maccard wrote: post #109
tlamponi wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

€40 gives you a dedicated server, not just a VPS. Getting metrics on that is not a hard problem, there are various projects that are relatively simple to set up. If you want to make it easier manage resources, metrics out of the box, and avoid (hoster) lock-in then I'd use a hyper visor distro like Proxmox VE (disclaimer, am a dev there) or the like, and you can migrate (or backup/restore) VMs or Containers easily to…

To make a fair comparison you need to consider the time cost for setting all of that other stuff up compared to having it out of the box. I'd an engineer on 100k takes a week to get it up and running then your vps cost 2k to set up and 40/month going forwards.

You'd have to figure out the setting up stuff just once though and then automate it. It's not like you have to go through this for every additional server you will add in the future or when you have to rebuild it.

Also, it doesn't take a week.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#175

Post by suction »

avrionov wrote: post #130
suction wrote: post #36

I wonder if before cloud computing, has there ever been a successful product / service where it was accepted with just a shrug that the volatility of monthly costs means it could bankrupt you with next month's bill, because of complexities and opaqueness of the cost structure make it virtually impossible to predict and protect against extreme peaks in all parts of the setup. Even if you run a relatively opaque cost s…

I worked on both cloud computing and on premise project. Before cloud computing the risks were different: - much harder to scale. It was much more common to over provision and have machines and bandwidth being unused for years. - when we were hit with very high traffic due to a bug or something else, most of the time it would lead to customer outages. Based on the contract some times it requires to pay back because S…

If you have a bug that renders your product unusable and refunds are in order, the flexibility of handling traffic peaks which a cloud provider offers won't solve that problem for you. It could even aggravate it. If a show-stopping bug is introduced, it would probably be preferable to fail quickly.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#177

Post by andi999 »

lpcvoid wrote: post #56

Can somebody explain to me why I wouldn't just rent a 40 EUR dedicated server from Hetzner with unlimited traffic and gigabit uplink? His 600GB/day is way less than what you get over a gigabit link within a day. Sure, sudden bursts would perhaps "throttle" at a gigabit, but according to his article that was only the cloudflare proxy anyhow, so no pain in having that take a few seconds longer. As far as I am concerned…

Maybe one wants to mantain the application and not the server? Long time ago i booked a vps, install some bsd on it and thought i am good.

A month later a ntp security vulnerability was discovered, soon the server was put offline, some 'patch your things asap' not so nice emails came in. From that time my take is one should spend some time probably daily on an own server if one wants to mantain it.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#178

Post by sourcecodeplz »

creshal wrote: post #91
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. Hetzner also offers managed servers where all this is taken care of, for relatively fair prices.

Basically the $40 server becomes $80 when managed by them.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#179

Post by danuker »

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...

I see there is a spending limit for the "intro" or "preview" plans designed for students, Visual Studio users, and resellers (the "hook" part in "hook, line, and sinker").

Not for actual cloud usage, like an actual pay-as-you-go plan where this would be useful.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/legal/offer-detail...

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#180

Post by hardwaresofton »

dx034 wrote: post #154
hardwaresofton wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 allow…

Ah sorry I should have been clearer on this -- "global cache" === CDN. Hetzner does incur a performance latency (unless you use the brand new US DC of course, and your customer happens to be in the US). IIRC right now you can't mix US cloud servers and German ones in the same Load balancer (also a relatively new hetzner cloud feature) but of course you can do some DNS tricks and get the loads to be fast.

Actually hosting files is super easy (Caddy is awesome, NGINX is awesome), but it's even better when you don't have to set up the server at all, for example just turn on "HTTP access" on a object storage bucket for example. So this is another place Hetzner kind of falls short though they do have hosting options[0], so basically the ideal solution here would be to deploy a simple Hetzner app (caddy/nginx or the hosted options hetzner has), set up a cheap CDN (Bunny, Cloudflare, etc) in front of it, and save money that way. If the bill is still too high just take the penalty or bias towards one geo (germany/US).

I was less talking about the difficulty of getting a server up and more about the CDN bit of the issue to make loads blazing fast!

[0]: https://www.hetzner.com/webhosting what you want is latency reduction. Usually what sites like Vercel and others give you is way faster loading time by putting stu

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