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AWS GuardDuty – the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

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Re: AWS GuardDuty – the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

#21

Post by ramraj07 »

m1keil wrote: post #2

GuardDuty is another example of brilliance of AWS pricing scheme and how they manage to twist your hand to pay extra which can cost quite a lot in the end of the month. When comparing EC2 to servers, nobody adds the added premiums of the extras. Things like CloudTrail, Support, GuardDuty, CloudWatch. All of these things have a variable cost that grows with usage and very hard to predict ahead of time. Just last week…

The biggest “hidden” cost for me was Elastic Blockstore IO charges! It started adding up quite quickly and I realized I had to think twice about doing IO intensive calculations on EC2! I switched over to lightsail (obviously these are for personal projects).

Re: AWS GuardDuty – the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

#22

Post by albert_e »

bushbaba wrote: post #7
m1keil wrote: post #2

GuardDuty is another example of brilliance of AWS pricing scheme and how they manage to twist your hand to pay extra which can cost quite a lot in the end of the month. When comparing EC2 to servers, nobody adds the added premiums of the extras. Things like CloudTrail, Support, GuardDuty, CloudWatch. All of these things have a variable cost that grows with usage and very hard to predict ahead of time. Just last week…

Until you realize how much the alternatives cost. You think Palo Alto networks is cheap?

Is there a feature and price comparison between the native AWS offering and Palo Alto somewhere? Would be super handy for one of our projects right now. Thanks!

Re: AWS GuardDuty – the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

#23

Post by discodave »

bnchandrapal wrote: post #5
judge2020 wrote: post #3

> The Ugly > Cost can get sky-high Is there _any_ service on AWS where you feel like you're getting more value than the dollars you're paying with (other than IAM and Free tier services)? It's no secret that AWS is one of the most successful and profitable modern businesses, but perhaps there's a hidden offering that does something, does it well, and costs very little compared to the value it brings.

There are a few AWS security services which are free/priced reasonably. Some free services: 1. AWS Org (Disable services and enforce guardrails) 2. VPC (Create private networks) 3. IAM (User access and IAM policy analyzer to help with least priv) 4. IAM Access Analyzer (Alert on resources with cross account & public access) 5. SSM Inventory & Patch manager (Basic check if all VMs have security updates installed) Reas…

Those services are gateway, or requirements for using other services though.

A VPC isn't useful without EC2 instances in it. AWS Organizations allows you to create more accounts, with more instances, databases etc in them!

Re: AWS GuardDuty – the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

#24

Post by pelagicAustral »

fomine3 wrote: post #14
judge2020 wrote: post #3

> The Ugly > Cost can get sky-high Is there _any_ service on AWS where you feel like you're getting more value than the dollars you're paying with (other than IAM and Free tier services)? It's no secret that AWS is one of the most successful and profitable modern businesses, but perhaps there's a hidden offering that does something, does it well, and costs very little compared to the value it brings.

Route 53

I use Route 53 for some of my domain names. It’s alright, but I think I get far more value on CloudFlare’s free tier. Except that I leave the AWS ecosystem...

Re: AWS GuardDuty – the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

#25

Post by yrgulation »

AWS managed to make things so much easier and cheaper compared to “classic” hosting that you now need twice as many devops employees and spend 10x in bills. Fortunately tech people aren’t financially literate so amazon can keep on squeezing all the while using free software made by the very same people. Congrats.

Re: AWS GuardDuty – the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

#26

Post by mkesper »

ramraj07 wrote: post #21
m1keil wrote: post #2

GuardDuty is another example of brilliance of AWS pricing scheme and how they manage to twist your hand to pay extra which can cost quite a lot in the end of the month. When comparing EC2 to servers, nobody adds the added premiums of the extras. Things like CloudTrail, Support, GuardDuty, CloudWatch. All of these things have a variable cost that grows with usage and very hard to predict ahead of time. Just last week…

The biggest “hidden” cost for me was Elastic Blockstore IO charges! It started adding up quite quickly and I realized I had to think twice about doing IO intensive calculations on EC2! I switched over to lightsail (obviously these are for personal projects).

Just use gp3, shouldn't be needed to request higher IO with it (except for DBs, probably cheaper to use DynamoDB etc then).

Re: AWS GuardDuty – the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

#27

Post by arinlen »

yrgulation wrote: post #25

AWS managed to make things so much easier and cheaper compared to “classic” hosting that you now need twice as many devops employees and spend 10x in bills. Fortunately tech people aren’t financially literate so amazon can keep on squeezing all the while using free software made by the very same people. Congrats.

> AWS managed to make things so much easier and cheaper compared to “classic” hosting that you now need twice as many devops employees and spend 10x in bills.

I'm far from a AWS fan but this take can't even be deemed an apples-to-orange comparison.

"Classical" hosting at best matches EC2. The absolute high-end "classical" hosting offers at best also offer something resembling EC2's VPC. Forget about regions, let alone anything resembling availability zones.

Everything else that AWS offers ends up being nice-to-have conveniences. Stuff like object storage and pub-sub and message queues and managed nosql and classical RDBMS services and managed kubernetes and integrated infrastrucure-as-code systems are way outside what a "classical" hosting company offers

Re: AWS GuardDuty – the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

#28

Post by [deleted] »

arinlen wrote: post #27
yrgulation wrote: post #25

AWS managed to make things so much easier and cheaper compared to “classic” hosting that you now need twice as many devops employees and spend 10x in bills. Fortunately tech people aren’t financially literate so amazon can keep on squeezing all the while using free software made by the very same people. Congrats.

> AWS managed to make things so much easier and cheaper compared to “classic” hosting that you now need twice as many devops employees and spend 10x in bills. I'm far from a AWS fan but this take can't even be deemed an apples-to-orange comparison. "Classical" hosting at best matches EC2. The absolute high-end "classical" hosting offers at best also offer something resembling EC2's VPC. Forget about regions, let alon…

[deleted]

Re: AWS GuardDuty – the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

#29

Post by OJFord »

shitlord wrote: post #9
judge2020 wrote: post #3

> The Ugly > Cost can get sky-high Is there _any_ service on AWS where you feel like you're getting more value than the dollars you're paying with (other than IAM and Free tier services)? It's no secret that AWS is one of the most successful and profitable modern businesses, but perhaps there's a hidden offering that does something, does it well, and costs very little compared to the value it brings.

I use DynamoDB, Lambda, Fargate, and a few other services for a side business. I don't want to spend my time fiddling around with a database or EC2 instances. I'm able to run everything I need for under $100 a month without a lot of overhead, which I think is a good value. This may change as the business grows. I can't complain about DynamoDB or Lambda pricing. Fargate is a little expensive for what we are running, b…

> Fargate is a little expensive for what we are running

Because of low usage? Lambda supports containers now (as of 2021 I think) so if you have a container to run (or something you could containerise) it's a relatively straightforward usage question which of Lambda/Fargate/EC2 makes sense on price. Lambda doesn't have to complicate comparison by being a completely different architecture/setup any more.

Re: AWS GuardDuty – the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

#30

Post by nijave »

judge2020 wrote: post #3

> The Ugly > Cost can get sky-high Is there _any_ service on AWS where you feel like you're getting more value than the dollars you're paying with (other than IAM and Free tier services)? It's no secret that AWS is one of the most successful and profitable modern businesses, but perhaps there's a hidden offering that does something, does it well, and costs very little compared to the value it brings.

S3 and load balancers (with ACM support). Having a magic load balancing appliance that autoscales and supports TLS termination is nice and reduces a lot of maintenance. There's nice value adds like OpenIDC support.

S3 is incredibly powerful and cost effective for the price. It has insane throughout and a very simple API (compared to, say, setting up SMB or NFS to support public uploads where you need more pieces)

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