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I got pwned by my cloud costs

troyhunt.com

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Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#181

Post by welterde »

pid-1 wrote: post #173
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.

Probably would run just fine on a <= 4 euro/month virtual machine too. Of course it doesn't quite scale to zero like APIGW,lambda,etc. but on the other hand you can be fairly confident to not pay more if your pet project suddenly lands on the front page of HN.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#182

Post by hardwaresofton »

hrrsn wrote: post #153
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.

apt install nginx

Apologies wasn't clear -- what I meant was the difficulty of setting up NGINX AND setting up a CDN to serve your content as fast as possible from multiple places is harder than it should be. They're both relatively simple tasks in this day and age but they're not connected/brain-dead-easy for a vendor like Hetzner.

Honestly, they're not even connected/brain-dead-easy for a vendor like AWS particularly -- you still have to click around a lot or write a bit of terraform/aws-cdk/etc when all you really want to do is throw a folder or zip file over the wall and point it at a domain.

There are tools like Ness[0] out there which look like a breath of fresh air but there needs to be more tools like that where the supported backends include a cloud like Hetzner/Leaseweb/OVH.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#183

Post by jimmydorry »

dx034 wrote: post #138
3pt14159 wrote: post #102

Happily donated to Troy. He's done more than most to help everyday folks weather these data breaches.

My issue with this is that the donation is basically to Microsoft for their dark patterns. There's no way this traffic cost much to Microsoft, so it all is added profit for their shareholders. Other providers would've provided the same service and bandwidth for a much lower price. I really appreciate the work that Troy is doing, but seeing much needed money ending up and Microsoft or Amazon leaves a bitter taste. I h…

Unfortunately, data in Aus really costs this much (more actually), from my experience colocating in a few data centres (I was typically paying $0.3/GB). It’s certainly possible it cost them less, but very doubtful on it being close to free.

EDIT: Apparently it was hosted out of US West, so I agree that the actual data cost would probably be a lot less.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#184

Post by octoberfranklin »

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…

Banking.

Credit card chargebacks, especially.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#185

Post by KingOfCoders »

sourcecodeplz wrote: post #178
creshal wrote: post #91

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. 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.

You can use their cloud offering $4/month, 20TB traffic.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#186

Post by throwawayffffas »

throwawayffffas wrote: post #176

Question, is the 0.014AUD per GB quoted here correct? Looking at the linked page[1] I would think the cost would be 0.1102AUD per GB as is quoted in the Internet egress section. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-au/pricing/details/bandwidth/

Also (3200 GB per day * 30 days) * 0.014 AUD per GB is 1344 AUD. While (3200 GB per day * 30 days * 0.1102 AUD per GB) is 10579.2 AUD much closer to the final bill.

My conclusion Troy still doesn't know how much he is paying.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#187

Post by tolien »

suction wrote: post #171
tolien wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yeah - if you look at Troy's graphs they're already calculating an average bandwidth and the alert he's configured has a threshold ~1/50th his current level.

Trying to set a hard number limit ahead of time is hard (estimating how much you'll use, don't want to set a number too low and get cut off plus cloud cost structures can be really hard to get your head around) but that basic level of anomaly detection should be there by default.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#188

Post by Aeolun »

adrianN wrote: post #160
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.

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…

We used to have an internal (and external) cloudfoundry instance. That was pretty nice as far as on-prem deployment options.

It’s just a shame they were permanently out of database servers with SSD storage, and for some reason couldn’t provision more for over a year.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#189

Post by yetihehe »

audiometry wrote: post #112
csours wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Azure offers a Cloudflare alternative, and I'm not sure they ever would - Cloudflare is too good and too cheap to compete against.

It's not that good. I'm constantly getting "Access Blocked" to various websites by Cloudflare trying to protect them....from me reading them.

I never do. Maybe you or something on your computer or network is the problem?

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#190

Post by sdze »

andi999 wrote: post #177
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.

Aren't Azure Compute Nodes also "bare metal"?
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