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Tell HN: I DDoSed myself using CloudFront and Lambda Edge and got a $4.5k bill

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Re: Tell HN: I DDoSed myself using CloudFront and Lambda Edge and got a $4.5k bill

#231

Post by justinhj »

sirwitti wrote: post #74

I'm very much on the boring technology side of things with respect to hosting. 40€ / month gets you a very powerful dedicated server that can easily handle millions of requests per day and performs incredibly well and can be managed easily. If you also use containers you even get quite a bit of flexibility and agility. To be honest I don't really understand the sentiment that developers can get away with not knowing…

Cloud functions are not used to look cool, nor are they used solely by people that “don’t know basic system admin”. Their use cases don’t line up with your needs and that is okay.

Re: Tell HN: I DDoSed myself using CloudFront and Lambda Edge and got a $4.5k bill

#232

Post by jscheel »

Speaking from my own experience, with a much, much larger bill: AWS support will most-likely ask you to set up the cloudwatch alarms and billing alerts properly, and to provide a plan to mitigate further issues. Once you've done that, they will be more inclined to reduce the charges.

Re: Tell HN: I DDoSed myself using CloudFront and Lambda Edge and got a $4.5k bill

#233

Post by eropple »

Mo3 wrote: post #170
eropple wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I'm actually in the process of doing Lambda versus persistent costing right now for a new project, where it's heavily load-based and very spiky, but the work on each packet of information is actually very lightweight. The tricky part here in AWS is not Lambda, which is pretty reasonable in general--the pitfalls I'm seeing are around data storage. DynamoDB is stealthily very expensive, either provisioned or on-dema…

DynamoDB is not required to use cloud functions. You can either use regular RDS like you said, Aurora or even just your own EC2-based cluster (all of these you can attach to the VPC the functions are attached to as well) and there's a lot of nice developments going on like Cloudflare D1. Totally agree on SQS, knowing PubSub as well I'd say they're pretty much on the same level. All the interconnectedness is where clo…

To clarify, I mentioned DynamoDB because it has a unit-costs model rather than an amortized-over-time cost model, and when you can harness that (and then focus on a simplified COGS model) you can do very well.

Re: Tell HN: I DDoSed myself using CloudFront and Lambda Edge and got a $4.5k bill

#234

Post by cortesoft »

kif wrote: post #120
sirwitti wrote: post #74

I'm very much on the boring technology side of things with respect to hosting. 40€ / month gets you a very powerful dedicated server that can easily handle millions of requests per day and performs incredibly well and can be managed easily. If you also use containers you even get quite a bit of flexibility and agility. To be honest I don't really understand the sentiment that developers can get away with not knowing…

Reading some replies here, it’s no wonder some startups go bankrupt while investing so much in infrastructure — all while not having enough users to justify more than a single dedicated server. Scalability should be the last thing in mind if your product sucks.

My frustration with replies like this one is assuming that everyone here is working on personal projects or at tiny startups trying to get users.

A lot of us work at big companies with lots of users and demand and aren't just making POCs, but every time we bring up scaling or maintenance or monitoring we are told not to worry about that yet.

Re: Tell HN: I DDoSed myself using CloudFront and Lambda Edge and got a $4.5k bill

#235

Post by eropple »

gunapologist99 wrote: post #214
eropple wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I'm actually in the process of doing Lambda versus persistent costing right now for a new project, where it's heavily load-based and very spiky, but the work on each packet of information is actually very lightweight. The tricky part here in AWS is not Lambda, which is pretty reasonable in general--the pitfalls I'm seeing are around data storage. DynamoDB is stealthily very expensive, either provisioned or on-dema…

NATS and NSQ are better than SQS if you can deploy them yourself. ZeroMQ is a great option as well, but it probably will require some major brain changes, since it doesn't fit most people's mental model of what a queuing server looks like.

ZeroMQ is too weird for me, yeah. NATS JetStream and NSQ are both promising but their durability options are unclear and while I have a background in devops/system architecture, I'm looking at building something whose entire staff is literally only me and so while I'm sure I can deploy it, I'm not sure I can effectively run it. SQS will do what I expect it to do, and that's pretty powerful.

Re: Tell HN: I DDoSed myself using CloudFront and Lambda Edge and got a $4.5k bill

#236

Post by cortesoft »

zamadatix wrote: post #106
Mo3 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're going to understand where the cool kids come from once your single dedicated server goes down or can't handle the load any more. As soon as you try to scale horizontally or become highly available and start to think about how to do it you end up falling into the same rabbit hole. > If you also use containers you even get quite a bit of flexibility and agility. Yeah... and then the only difference is between a…

For 99% of projects you're never going to hit the point a single server (or group of servers if you truly need redundancy for some level of uptime) can't handle the load. For the other 1% that end up needing that scale I have a hard time accepting it's actually better to start building for massive scale day 1 instead of day 1000.

Sure, but not all of us are working at tiny startups or on personal projects. Many of us here work for large companies that have real scale already and are trying to solve those problems.

Why does everyone assume everyone else works at tiny startups?

Re: Tell HN: I DDoSed myself using CloudFront and Lambda Edge and got a $4.5k bill

#237

Post by codegangsta »

eropple wrote: post #235
gunapologist99 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NATS and NSQ are better than SQS if you can deploy them yourself. ZeroMQ is a great option as well, but it probably will require some major brain changes, since it doesn't fit most people's mental model of what a queuing server looks like.

ZeroMQ is too weird for me, yeah. NATS JetStream and NSQ are both promising but their durability options are unclear and while I have a background in devops/system architecture, I'm looking at building something whose entire staff is literally only me and so while I'm sure I can deploy it, I'm not sure I can effectively run it. SQS will do what I expect it to do, and that's pretty powerful.

disclosure: I work at Synadia

We do have a hosted version of NATS called NGS that is multi-cloud, multi-geo and is really easy to set up https://synadia.com/ngs

Re: Tell HN: I DDoSed myself using CloudFront and Lambda Edge and got a $4.5k bill

#238

Post by masukomi »

jpalomaki wrote: post #116
sirwitti wrote: post #74

I'm very much on the boring technology side of things with respect to hosting. 40€ / month gets you a very powerful dedicated server that can easily handle millions of requests per day and performs incredibly well and can be managed easily. If you also use containers you even get quite a bit of flexibility and agility. To be honest I don't really understand the sentiment that developers can get away with not knowing…

Servers can also be liability. You need to document, implement and maintaing hardening, have a process for regularly patching os and apps, monitor logs, have backup and disaster recovery procedures, regularly test the procedures, figure how to implement data encryption at rest, implement high-availability and so on. Good platform-as-service can solve many things for you and let you focus on the core thing you are pro…

> You need to document, implement and maintaing hardening, have a process for regularly patching os and apps, monitor logs, have backup and disaster recovery procedures, regularly test the procedures...

There are many hosts out there who will take care of _all_ of that for you. You just need to install your stuff on the box, and they take care of the rest. Logs and monitoring... you'll prolly want something custom anyway rather than whatever anyone else offers.

> figure how to implement data encryption at rest,

you have to do that anyway

> implement high-availability and so on

again, many hosts who provide easy ways to manage that for you.

Re: Tell HN: I DDoSed myself using CloudFront and Lambda Edge and got a $4.5k bill

#239

Post by capableweb »

ryandvm wrote: post #61
capableweb wrote: post #20

Off-topic maybe, but I'm very curious as it's hard to find hard numbers: > my usual bill is $200/month How many req/second are you serving? What kind of things are happening? It seems like the bills are outrageously expensive when it comes to various cloud services, as I'm personally hosting a service that does between 10-100 req/second on average during a month, and my monthly bill end up being closer to $40/month,…

It depends on how efficient the dev is. For comparison, I've been running a paid Slack app (a few $K per year) that manages to run entirely within the free tier on Google Cloud Platform.

Paid Slack app just receives webhooks from a Slack organization right? So the amount of traffic it handles amount at max to the amount of messages that gets sent around in Slack, which tends to be very low (in comparison to other applications where user interactions can trigger many requests for example)

Re: Tell HN: I DDoSed myself using CloudFront and Lambda Edge and got a $4.5k bill

#240

Post by [deleted] »

eropple wrote: post #235
gunapologist99 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NATS and NSQ are better than SQS if you can deploy them yourself. ZeroMQ is a great option as well, but it probably will require some major brain changes, since it doesn't fit most people's mental model of what a queuing server looks like.

ZeroMQ is too weird for me, yeah. NATS JetStream and NSQ are both promising but their durability options are unclear and while I have a background in devops/system architecture, I'm looking at building something whose entire staff is literally only me and so while I'm sure I can deploy it, I'm not sure I can effectively run it. SQS will do what I expect it to do, and that's pretty powerful.

[deleted]
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