Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I got pwned by my cloud costs

troyhunt.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 657 posts

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#201

Post by dustinmoris »

technion wrote: post #64
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…

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...

No post body was provided.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#202

Post by mstrem »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #80

I don't understand it. Does a cloudflare edge server sit inside Azure?

No. Cloudflare is configured as a reverse proxy in front of the site. So traffic reaches the Cloudflare edge first, then it is proxied to the origin on Azure unless the file is served directly from the Cloudflare cache.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#203

Post by stickfigure »

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…

The difference with a PaaS/serverless system is that I don't need to hire you, or have someone on my team learn to be you.

I'm sorry, but all that stuff you describe doesn't bring any business value. My customers don't care what hypervisor I'm running, so I don't care either. PaaS means someone else deals with it, forever. The last time I had to employ an ops (or devops) person was 2007.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#204

Post by RamblingCTO »

Nextgrid wrote: post #163
dx034 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The usual answer you'll get is that it's not "infrastructure as code", is not highly available, etc... and while that's theoretically true, in practice modern hardware is reliable enough that I'll take the gamble (and the complexity of clouds and their control plane means that you may have more outages than what would be caused by hardware failures).

You can always set it up as such though. We're using k8s/terraform on hetzner cloud perfectly fine on like 30% of the AWS costs we had before that. Maintenance is minimal as well.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#205

Post by viraptor »

dustinmoris wrote: post #201
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...

Quoted post unavailable.

That's really extreme. How about: Keep in mind that any review may be paid for? FWIW, he complained a lot about Ubiquiti issues on his podcast, so it's not like he can't say bad things about them. (as in half an episode about the controller dropping his configuration or something like that)

> selling on stolen password data [...] that he will never talk about

How do you know about it then? That's really a [citation needed] quote.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#206

Post by ignoramous »

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 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.

Depends on the team size of the said startup [0]. In my opinion, tech-shops are better off using new-age cloud providers like fly.io / glitch.com / render.com / railway.app / replit.com / deno.com / workers.dev etc [1].

[0] https://tailscale.com/blog/modules-monoliths-and-microservic...

[1] https://www.swyx.io/cloud-distros/

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#207

Post by hkt »

tome wrote: post #135
hkt wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I like Mythic Beasts and use their raspberry pi servers and VPSes. Much less terrifying pricing and the support is good too.

Yes, their support is amazing . I can email the support address and have a real human who knows what he/she is doing reply within minutes or hours at most.

Exactly! It is quite refreshing to not have to battle past first line to find someone with the understanding to help. No shibboleth required. Cheaper hosting, too.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#208

Post by k8sToGo »

omegalulw wrote: post #111
bennyp101 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's not cool, and won't make your CV sparkle. I'm sure there becomes a point where cost of (hardware + maintenance + staffing) > (cloud + staffing), in which case sure crack on. But like you, I'll stick to a rented server for my stuff.

The direction is opposite IMO. As you grow bigger on prem starts making a lot more sense.

No thanks. In our case we would then need to hire DBA etc. I prefer to have as many managed (in this case by AWS) services as possible.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#209

Post by pmlnr »

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…

Hype, HIPPOs, FOMO, buzzword driven resume.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#210

Post by viraptor »

welterde wrote: post #181
pid-1 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Keep in mind that the "<= 4 euro/month virtual machine" has maybe 256MB of RAM available and running anything beyond nginx + a web server which needs to be cycled every few days due to memory fragmentation can become challenging. I've tried this many times, but it's just not worth the extra hassle. And I want a vpn, monitoring and database even on the toy project server as a minimum in reality.
Post reply on HN