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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

#301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hetzner dedicated server * 3 + k3s + vnet + longhorn + metallb = basically the cloud. I can snapshot a database disk with a click of a button and restore the snapshot with yet another few clicks. I have 1.5 TB of highly available disk space, 40 cores of full CPU power, 160 GB of RAM, & dynamically provisioned IPs for metallb. For only $130USD a month. For the same price in Azure, I had 6 CPU cores & 8 GB RAM.

You could do that. But let's say need 4x vCPU: 72, Memory (GiB): 144 for 4 hours. Or you need that 12 hours a day but for the rest of the time you need 2 cpu and 4 GiB of memory. You need to handle traffic spikes such as TV traffic. Yes you could self-host a cloud env but you can't scale your resources the way you can with cloud.

> But let's say need 4x vCPU: 72, Memory (GiB): 144 for 4 hours.

I would probably send you back to where ever you came from and tell you to re-engineer that. Cloud or no cloud.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#302

Have you contacted Azure? On one hand you owe the money “fair and square”, but on the other if I were them I’d waive an unexpected $10k bill to a good faith actor that was incurred without any proactive notification by Azure.

Also there is 0% chance serving this traffic cost Microsoft anything near $10000.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#303
post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe one wants to mantain the application and not the server? Long time ago i booked a vps, install some bsd on it and thought i am good. A month later a ntp security vulnerability was discovered, soon the server was put offline, some 'patch your things asap' not so nice emails came in. From that time my take is one should spend some time probably daily on an own server if one wants to mantain it.

Right, because a barebone docker hypervisor needs so much admining.

It runs NTP, does it not?

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#304
post #287

We've been thinking about this for a while, and if there is any way we can catch these types of cost spikes before they happen. We've managed to do it for Terraform resources using an estimation approach, and using a usage file, you can model expected usage-based resources ( https://github.com/infracost/infracost/blob/master/infracost... ), but this one has got us thinking more about policies. To be clear - we would…

I think this is fundamental to on-demand services. Anything outside terraform or another configuration file system is hard to reason about. If cloudflare is in your config system, then you could put up a warning that files bigger than whatever won’t get cached, but that still assumes a level of knowledge about the system that you don’t generally have.

Setting up limits and alerts as part of the system creation is usually the best strategy.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#305
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…

Where did you get 600 GB per day? That only would’ve cost $8.40 per day. It looks like it was actually 25 TB per day which is over 40x what you said.

From the article:

This was about AU$350 a day for a month… priced at AU$0.014 per GB

A company could not stay in business if every one of their “unlimited 1 Gbps” customers for €40 per month actually used that bandwidth.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#306
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Exactly. Speed of light is too slow. Speed of light in cable is 200.000km/s, so if you are 10.000km away, your minimum ping time is 100ms (+server time).

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hetzner dedicated server * 3 + k3s + vnet + longhorn + metallb = basically the cloud. I can snapshot a database disk with a click of a button and restore the snapshot with yet another few clicks. I have 1.5 TB of highly available disk space, 40 cores of full CPU power, 160 GB of RAM, & dynamically provisioned IPs for metallb. For only $130USD a month. For the same price in Azure, I had 6 CPU cores & 8 GB RAM.

The German companies are really nuts. The cost to value ratio is through the roof. I’m a happy Netcup customer, and I honestly don’t know how they do it and make any profit at all. I wish they’d bring those same prices to some US data centers.

I'm sure there are some big political flamewars to be had in this area regarding per capita productivity.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#308
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they provide managed services that VPS hosters don't have or which would require the overhead of maintaining and patching servers, and many people just want to get on with their lives instead of worrying about OS exploits...

That's why you take some kind of "managed hosting" where all of this is taken care of.

like AWS?

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#309
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…

Just did the calc and 600GB/day is about 55Mbit/s. That's really not a lot and if there's not too much computation server-side you could serve this from a raspberry pi at home (provided you have good uplink). But that's assuming you keep the CloudFlare cache of course, or as author mentioned himself, advertising only torrents for the multi-gig files. I really don't understand the cloud craze. Everything is more compl…

Most people that use cloud computing aren’t stuck with the bills the companies they work for are.

As to difficulty, they “solve” organizational problems by avoiding sticker shock when someone wants 100+k in equip that’s often a huge number of hoops to jump through and possibly months of delays, a giant bill every month and nobody a complains about the electric bill etc.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#310
post #47

One thing I hate about the cloud providers is that there isn't an option to set a maximum cost. I would prefer to plug the cable of my side project than just receive an email saying me that next bill is going to be over my cost. I understand not everyone would like to do that, but I would like to have that option.

But there is an option. In Azure you can "set a budget". He even goes over it in the post. Did you read the linked article?
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