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AWS S3: Sometimes you should press the $100k button

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Re: AWS S3: Sometimes you should press the $100k button

#181

Post by beberlei »

llbeansandrice wrote: post #154
Jgrubb wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been learning the ins and outs of the major 3 providers cloud billing setups for the last year, and I'm just getting started. This is not a 1 hour job, but you're right that someone in your team needs to understand it.

At my last job we had a team spend an entire quarter just to help visualize and properly track all of our AWS expenditures. It's a huge job.

Not confused why there is talk about software developer shortage when it seems a good amount of them work on this kind of nonsense. Talk about bs jobs.

Re: AWS S3: Sometimes you should press the $100k button

#182

Post by red0point »

Mave83 wrote: post #166

Just avoid the cloud. You get a Ceph storage with the performance of Amazon S3 at the price point of Amazon S3 Glacier in any Datacenter worldwide deployed if you want. There are companies that help you doing this. Feel free to ask if you need help.

I want to know what the absolute cheapest way of doing this is, without having a lot of CapEx. I thought of renting dedicated storage servers (e.g. Hetzner) and slapping Ceph on them.

Do you have another, better, idea?

Re: AWS S3: Sometimes you should press the $100k button

#183

Post by saimiam »

jiggawatts wrote: post #177
deanCommie wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HackerNews loves to criticize the cloud. It always reminds me of this infamous Dropbox comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 The cloud abstracts SO MUCH complexity from the user. The fact that people are then gleefully taking these "simple" services and overloading them with way too much data, and way too much complexity on top is not a failure of the underlying primitives, but a success. Without these c…

> The people footgunning themselves with massive bills would just not have a working solution AT ALL. Sometimes guard rails are a good thing, and the AWS philosophy has very firmly been against guard rails, especially related to spending. The issue has come up here again and again that AWS refuses to add cost limits, even though they are capable of it. Azure copied this limitation. I don't mean that they didn't imple…

> There is literally nothing I can do to stop the haemorrhaging if the site goes popular.

There’s WAF with rate based limiting to prevent script kiddies for randomly hitting your URLs for files to download and run up your egress prices. Waf costs $5/month plus a flat fee per extra rule.

For DDOS protection there’s Shield which is built into cloudfront and should be enough for most people but if you need more control they have Shield Advanced.

The “Stop Button” for s3 is an application layer responsibility, imho though S3 Should make clean up easier.

Re: AWS S3: Sometimes you should press the $100k button

#184

Post by bpicolo »

cmckn wrote: post #120
pphysch wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a related note, suppose the Fed raises rates to mitigate inflation and indirectly kills thousands of zombie companies, including many SaaS renting the cloud. What happens to their data? Does the cloud unilaterally evict/delete it, or does it get handled like an asset -- auctioned off, etc?

I’m not aware of a cloud provider that is contractually allowed to do such a thing (except maybe alibaba by way of the CCP). Dying companies get purchased and have their assets pilfered every day, the same thing would happen with cloud assets.

If the dead company stops paying the bills, Amazon can definitely delete that.

Re: AWS S3: Sometimes you should press the $100k button

#185

Post by arein3 »

rizkeyz wrote: post #167

I did the back-of-the-envelope math once. You get a Petabyte of storage today for $60K/year if you buy the hardware (retail disks, server, energy). It actually fits into the corner of a room. What do you get for $60K in AWS S3? Maybe a PB for 3 months (w/o egress). If you replace all your hardware every year, the cloud is 4x more expensive. If you manage to use your getto-cloud for 5 year, you are 20x cheaper than Am…

>I guess by 2030 we should be able to record everything a human says, sees, hears and speaks in an entire life for every human on this planet.

That's a very good point.

Are you employed?

Would you like to join Meta?

Re: AWS S3: Sometimes you should press the $100k button

#186

Post by prewett »

deanCommie wrote: post #139
asim wrote: post #60

The AWS horror stories never cease to amaze me. It's like we're banging our heads against the wall expecting a different outcome each time. What's more frustrating, the AWS zealots are quite happy to tell you how you're doing it wrong. It's the users fault for misusing the service. The reality is, AWS was built for a specific purpose and demographic of user. It's now complexity and scale makes it unusable for newer d…

HackerNews loves to criticize the cloud. It always reminds me of this infamous Dropbox comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 The cloud abstracts SO MUCH complexity from the user. The fact that people are then gleefully taking these "simple" services and overloading them with way too much data, and way too much complexity on top is not a failure of the underlying primitives, but a success. Without these c…

A surprise massive bill can be worse than no solution at all, in my opinion. And if the easy path leads to massive-bill lock-in, that's also not very helpful. It's not like people didn't know how to run servers and remote storage before AWS showed up. Before AWS showed up at least your data-center costs were pretty predictable: you managed the servers yourself, so whatever the salaries summed to, that was it. It's not like poor programming ate up your years' IT budget by May.

Re: AWS S3: Sometimes you should press the $100k button

#187

Post by bpicolo »

wackget wrote: post #162
rgallagher27 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things like mobile/webisite analytics events. User A clicked this menu item, User B viewed this images etc All streamed into S3 in chunks of smallish files. It's cheaper to store them in S3 over a DB and use tools like Athena or Redshift spectrum to query.

Wow. What makes it cheaper than using a DB? Is it just because the DB will create some additional metadata about each stored row or something?

S3 is often essentially a database in these scenarios. You store columnar data format files in S3, and various analytical systems can query with S3 as a massive backing storage.

Re: AWS S3: Sometimes you should press the $100k button

#188

Post by dalyons »

stingraycharles wrote: post #168
spelunker wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As mentioned, encrypt something and throw a way the key, often called "crypto shredding".

Ahh I see, and that way you can quickly “remove” a whole lot of data by just removing the key, which makes for cheap operations, and/or more flexible workflow (you can periodically compact the database and remove entries for which you have no key). Is my understanding correct?

yes, but also its that a lot of the data these days ends up in pseudo-append-only stores (like s3/glacier, or many data warehouse products) where deletes/updates to old data are extremely expensive. Or just having to scan petabytes of cold stored data looking for a particular users records. Throwing away the key is instant and "free".

Re: AWS S3: Sometimes you should press the $100k button

#189

Post by geoduck14 »

marcosdumay wrote: post #135
dasil003 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure any sizable group is banging their head against a wall. Yes, AWS is complex. Yes, AWS has cost foot guns. These are natural outcomes of removing friction from scaling. Sure we could start with something simpler, but as you may have noticed, even the more basic hosting providers like DigitalOcean and Linode have been adding S3-compatible object storage because of its proven utility. In terms of making som…

> These are natural outcomes of removing friction from scaling. Yes, and making scaling frictionless brings a very tiny bit of value for everybody, but a huge amount of value for the cloud operator. Any bit of friction would completely remove that problem. Also, focusing on scaling before efficiency benefits nobody but the cloud provider.

>Yes, and making scaling frictionless brings a very tiny bit of value for everybody

I disagree. Using AWS in a frictionless way has made the difference between not deploying applications and deploying them. In one example, I used S3 and EC2 to deploy an app used by several thousand users at work - the deployment was completely scripted and tested before the old app was taken down. It eliminated errors in deploying, increased frequency of denying (which enabled faster security patches), reduced down time from 6 hours to zero, enabled new features for our users (due to scripted testing). Everyone won - and I got a promotion :)

Re: AWS S3: Sometimes you should press the $100k button

#190

Post by gmiller123456 »

wackget wrote: post #150

As a web developer who has never used anything except locally-hosted databases, can someone explain what kind of system actually produces billions or trillions of files which each need to be individually stored in a low-latency environment? And couldn't that data be stored in an actual database?

    And couldn't that data be stored in an actual database?
This is the "it's turtles all the way down" concept. A database is just going to store data in the file system, plus some extra overhead. Putting data in a database saves you nothing unless you actually need the extra functionality a database provides.

That overhead doesn't mean much if you have 10 users and 1gb of data. But it adds up in very large systems.

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