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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

#191

Post by Aeolun »

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.

True, but setting things up on AWS isn’t free either.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#192

Post by stickfigure »

dx034 wrote: post #122
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…

Most cloud users will have a VM somewhere which you also have to manage.

Not at all. GCP, AWS, and Digital Ocean all have PaaS/serverless systems that eliminate the concept of VM (from your perspective). I haven't managed a production VM in many years.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#193

Post by bencollier49 »

dx034 wrote: post #127
alfiedotwtf wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only thing that would really help were a hard spending limit that stops all services except storage. Sadly, I haven't found a way to do that with AWS

It's funny that even Hetzner can do that and AWS can't. Shows that there's no interest from AWS to prevent these things from happening.

IMO this is something which ought to be written into law. It'd be easy to implement a kill switch, and would actually encourage innovation, as people would feel more empowered to experiment with the technology.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#194

Post by NicoJuicy »

fs111 wrote: post #69
technion wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is a Microsoft MVP. A title that is given for being a "community evangelist" of Microsoft. You wouldn't get that throwing it on a Heztner machine. Edit: Consider this article, and Geoff's statement about Azure credits. https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/21/microsoft_revokes_mvp...

Sounds like a pretty expensive privilege. How is using cloudflare okay in this then? Cloudflare is also not Azure

Cloudflare is a partner of Azure ( or vice versa).

= Azure has an integration to use cloudflare for the cdn.

https://www.cloudflare.com/multi-cloud/azure/

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#195

Post by capableweb »

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.

From the operators point of view, Cloudflare is cheap and often used when you don't understand that "premium bandwidth" or whatever they call it these days, are just bandwidth you pay way too much for.

From the users point of view, Cloudflare will frequently stop you from accessing things and introduces more single points of failure in the internet infrastructure. But on the good side, they have pretty good edge endpoints so your browsing might be a bit faster, when they allow you to browse.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#196

Post by capableweb »

yetihehe wrote: post #189
audiometry wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Usually it's because they live in a different country than what people consider the "Western World" or something like that. When I'm in Europe, I don't see that page very often, unless in Eastern Europe. But if I'm in Asia, Africa or Central/South America, then I encounter that page all the time.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#197

Post by capableweb »

vitro wrote: post #82
closeparen wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps for the same reason that the vast majority of the readers of this site don’t use Hetzner: they are not European and neither are their users.

OVH then? They have similar offerings, unlimited traffic, multiple datacenters to pick from.

I guess that's out of the question too if it's a problem that the company is European, since OVH is French.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#198

Post by capableweb »

hnbad wrote: post #105
closeparen wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps for the same reason that the vast majority of the readers of this site don’t use Hetzner: they are not European and neither are their users.

The reason Europeans tend to favor European service providers generally has to do with strong data protection guarantees and some level of protection against foreign surveillance. In practice a lot of European companies still use US services or at least services provided by US companies -- Troy Hunt is Australian and uses Azure from Microsoft, so this isn't just a thing Europeans do either. I'd love to hear your reas…

> I'd love to hear your reasoning why people who aren't European would prefer to avoid European service providers.

I'm generally a Hetzner fan as well for global services, but I can see the point in avoiding Hetzner (for example) if all of your users are in the US, since Hetzner only offers dedicated servers located in Europe (Germany and Finland if I'm not mistaken). Generally you want users to hit servers that are close to them, so something like Vultr would be better if the scenario mentioned before applies.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#200

Post by capableweb »

3pt14159 wrote: post #140
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…

I can see both sides. If you're a startup that needs to be able to scale quickly if product market fit is achieved, the cloud really saves your bacon. Or is your ten person team really going to figure out how to get Postgres to reliably run with billions of records, with encrypted backups, etc? It's basically a form of permanent debt. Faster product market fit, higher long term infrastructure costs until you have eno…

I keep hearing this argument against using your own infrastructure again and again, and I'm not sure how true it is.

I've worked with teams on both sides, and everyone is gonna have to deal with figuring out how to run at scale, it's just different ways of achieving that.

I've worked with teams that manage their own infrastructure with dedicated servers, and not having to think about scaling for a long time as the one beefy server could just take whatever load you threw at it.

I've also worked with teams who don't manage their own infrastructure and thought they were ready to scale without issues, but once the scale actually happened, it turned out there was more things to consider than just the amount of servers you run, race-conditions were everywhere but no one thought about that.

Definitely a case of "right tool for the right job", but I don't think it's as easy as "Self-managed: harder to scale, PaaS/Cloud: easy peazy to scale".

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