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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

#331

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

pbalau wrote: post #329
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…

Wouldn't riding a horse prevent that car crash?

Horse carriage accidents were surprisingly common and deadly for the low speeds they traveled at - but, I did enjoy the analogy [=

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#333

Post by moreira »

SkipperCat wrote: post #291
southerntofu wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The cloud is great for scaling. The lead time for new servers deployed in a data center is weeks compared to seconds in the cloud. Plus there's no sunk cost in the cloud - you can turn it off when done and it evaporates. Also, the cloud offers managed software as a service. You don't have to manage your own HA DB cluster or PubSub. It's all just there and it works. That can save you a lot on technical labor costs. Bu…

> If you don't know what you're doing, you can nuke your budget super quick.

And even if you do, which I think you’ll agree Troy Hunt does.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#334

Post by lkxijlewlf »

frameset wrote: post #310
kuu wrote: 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?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#335

Post by olavgg »

SkipperCat wrote: post #291
southerntofu wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The cloud is great for scaling. The lead time for new servers deployed in a data center is weeks compared to seconds in the cloud. Plus there's no sunk cost in the cloud - you can turn it off when done and it evaporates. Also, the cloud offers managed software as a service. You don't have to manage your own HA DB cluster or PubSub. It's all just there and it works. That can save you a lot on technical labor costs. Bu…

The cloud is great for scaling indeed, but a cheap Intel V4 server with 44 cores from Ebay for $2000 can handle a shit ton of traffic too.

If I were building a new business, I would use both cloud and colo. But I do understand that everyone don't have that luxury.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#336

Post by defaultname »

kuu wrote: 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.

Oracle has fantastic budget tools. Not just "you've passed your budget", but "you're forecast to pass your budget in 22 days before the month is up". And you can couple it with quotas to create hard budgets.

AWS has decent tools in this regard, but it pales compared to Oracle. Azure is a product I've never used with any scale (just small projects), but the fact that it actually costs money to setup alerts is gross (and morally reprehensible). Even if it's a trivial amount, that alone just sours the product in my eyes. I mean, already Azure is pretty uncompetitive unless you're running on free credits, as Troy apparently is (purportedly some $13K per year, so unsure what the pitch for donations to cover a bill is about).

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#337

Post by Abishek_Muthian »

Valuable investigation steps to find the erring cloud resource, But as Troy concludes 'Budget Alerts' would have saved him from this issue.

No matter what the traffic is, The first thing to do with any cloud service provider is to set the budget alerts according to our wallet, be it one with credits or otherwise. At this point, I don't even try any new cloud service provider who doesn't offer credible budget alerts.

Another key takeaway is,

> Huh, no "CacheControl" value. But there wasn't one on any of the previous zip files either and the Cloudflare page rule above should be overriding anything here by virtue of the edge cache TTL setting anyway.

Even this could blow up. All cloud service providers set the "CacheControl" to "No" and if we would want to cache something which is not cached by CF by default e.g. *html using Page Rules then we need to set CacheControl (e.g. max-age) at the cloud service provider end too.

P.S. I've written about these recently on my blog titled 'Saving Cloud Costs'[1] from a frugal solopreneur PoV.

[1] https://hitstartup.com/saving-cloud-costs/

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#339

Post by windexh8er »

fs111 wrote: post #69
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...

Sounds like a pretty expensive privilege. How is using cloudflare okay in this then? Cloudflare is also not Azure

The simple answer here is that Troy was using Cloudflare to offset costs he knew he would incur with Azure. He states verbatim:

"Firstly, I always knew bandwidth on Azure was expensive and I should have been monitoring it better, particularly on the storage account serving the most data."

...and he didn't have simple monitors in place to alert him of uncommon billing spikes.

I get your point, if he's not OK with using Hetzner how is Cloudflare any better? It's not. But the reality is Cloud operations are a fine dance of weaving services together to realize all of the heavily advertised savings. I'd argue that a lot of Troy's projects that use all of the cloud native functions could have also been implemented on much more standard stacks and, likely, been just as cost and performance effective. But that's not going to get him the advertising for Microsoft.

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