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

A $1k AWS mistake

geocod.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 281 posts

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#201

Post by antonvs »

nine_k wrote: post #94
antonvs wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a non sequitur. I know how to self host my infra, but I’ve been using cloud services for the last 15 years because it means I don’t have to deal with self hosting my infra. It runs completely by itself (mostly managed services, including k8s) and the only time I need to deal with it is when I want to change something.

I'd say that was irony. BTW you can of course self-host k8s, or dokku, or whatnot, and have as easy a deployment story as with the cloud. (But not necessarily as easy a maintenance story for the whole thing.)

Reading the commenter's subsequent comments, they're serious about self-hosting.

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#202

Post by charcircuit »

mr_toad wrote: post #182
charcircuit wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You probably don't need it. I see so many people getting price gouged by S3 when it would be orders of magnitude cheaper to just throw the files on a basic HTTP server. I sometimes feel bad using people's services built with S3 as I know my personal usage is costing them a lot of money despite paying them nothing.

A web server isn’t a storage solution. And a storage solution like S3 isn’t a delivery network. If you use the wrong tool expect problems.

A web storage is connected to storage solutions like SSDs and S3 is connected to delivery networks like Internet. Using SSDs to store files or Internet to send files to a user are not the wrong tools.

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#203

Post by weberer »

ipsento606 wrote: post #196
cristiangraz wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS just released flat-rate pricing plans with no overages yesterday. You opt into a $0, $15, or $200/mo plan and at the end of the month your bill is still $0, $15, or $200. It solves the problem of unexpected requests or data transfer increasing your bill across several services. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/networking-and-content-delivery...

https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/ says that the $15-per-month plan comes with 50TB of "data transfer" Does "data transfer" not mean CDN bandwidth here? Otherwise, that price seems two orders of magnitude less than I would expect

The $15 plan notably does not come with DDoS protection though.

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#204

Post by antonvs »

rikafurude21 wrote: post #188
antonvs wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But not as easy a maintenance story That's my whole point. Zero maintenance. For a tinkerer who's focused on the infra, then sure, hosting your own can make sense. But for anyone who's focused on literally anything else, it doesn't make any sense.

It doesnt make any sense to you that I would like to avoid a potential 60K bill because of a configuration error? If youre not working at faang your employer likely cares too. Especially if its your own business you would care. You really can't think of _one_ case where self hosting makes any sense?

> It doesnt make any sense to you that I would like to avoid a potential 60K bill because of a configuration error?

This is such an imaginary problem. The examples like this you hear about are inevitably the outliers who didn't pay any attention to this issue until they were forced to.

For most services, it's incredibly easy to constrain your costs anyway. You do have to pay attention to the pricing model of the services you use, though - if a DDOS is going to generate a big cost for you, you probably made a bad choice somewhere.

> You really can't think of _one_ case where self hosting makes any sense?

Only if it's something you're interested in doing, or if you're so big you can hire a team to deal with that. Otherwise, why would you waste time on it?

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#205

Post by ipsento606 »

weberer wrote: post #203
ipsento606 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/ says that the $15-per-month plan comes with 50TB of "data transfer" Does "data transfer" not mean CDN bandwidth here? Otherwise, that price seems two orders of magnitude less than I would expect

The $15 plan notably does not come with DDoS protection though.

the pricing page says it comes with "Always-on DDoS Protection" but not "Advanced DDoS Protection"

I have no idea what these terms mean in practice

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#206

Post by viraptor »

wiether wrote: post #63
viraptor wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you absolutely don't want the service gateways to exist by default. Why? My work life is in terraform and cloudformation and I can't think of a reason you wouldn't want to have those by default. I mean I can come up with some crazy excuses, but not any realistic scenario. Have you got any? (I'm assuming here that they'd make the performance impact ~0 for the vpc setup since everyone would depend on it)

Because I want my TF to reflect exactly my infra. If I declare two aws_route resources for my route table, I don't want a third route existing and being invisible. I agree that there is no logical reason to not want a service gateway, but it doesn't mean that it should be here by default. The same way you need to provision an Internet Gateway, you should create your services gateways by yourself. TF modules are here…

There's lots of stuff that exists in AWS without being in TF. Where do you create a router, a DHCP server, each ENI, etc. ? Why are the instances in a changing state in ASG rather than all in TF? Some things are not exactly as they exist in TF, because it makes more sense that way. We never had 1:1 correspondence in the first place.

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#207

Post by blutoot »

Regardless of the AWS tech in question (and yes VPCE for non-compute services is a very common pattern in an enterprise setup using AWS since VPC with NAT is a pretty fundamental requirement), I honestly believe this was the biggest miss from the author: “Always validate your assumptions. I thought "EC2 to S3 is free" was enough. I should have tested with a small amount of data and monitored the costs before scaling up to terabytes.” To me this is a symptom of DevOps/infra engineers being too much in love with infra automation without actually testing the full end to end flow.

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#208

Post by citizenpaul »

Its staggering to me that after all this time there are somehow still people in potions like this that are working without basic cost monitoring alerts on cloud/SaaS services

It really shows the Silicon Vally disconnect with the real world, where money matters.

Re: A $1k AWS mistake

#209

Post by seniorThrowaway »

antonvs wrote: post #111
nine_k wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say that was irony. BTW you can of course self-host k8s, or dokku, or whatnot, and have as easy a deployment story as with the cloud. (But not necessarily as easy a maintenance story for the whole thing.)

> But not as easy a maintenance story That's my whole point. Zero maintenance. For a tinkerer who's focused on the infra, then sure, hosting your own can make sense. But for anyone who's focused on literally anything else, it doesn't make any sense.

Cloud is not great for GPU workloads. I run a nightly workload that takes 6-8 hours to run and requires a Nvidia GPU, along with high RAM and CPU requirements. It can't be interrupted. It has a 100GB output and stores 6 nightly versions of that. That's easily $600+ a month in AWS just for that one task. By self-hosting it I have access to the GPU all the time for a fixed up front relatively low cost and can also use the HW for other things (I do). That said, these are all backend / development type resources, self hosting customer facing or critical things yourself is a different prospect, and I do use cloud for those types of workloads. RDS + EKS for a couple hundred a month is an amazing deal for what is essentially zero maintenance application hosting. My point is that "literally anything else" is extreme, as always, it is "right tool for the job".
Post reply on HN