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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

#351

Post by carlivar »

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 have a large environment to build in a certain region, the cloud lead time is months also. We have to give our cloud provider months notice before building in a region. But we have a pretty serious and profitable workload. Your statement is correct for the 90% of companies with relatively small infrastructure needs.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#352

Post by Kneecaps07 »

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…

There's an argument to be made for quality of life for your employees. As someone who has transitioned from on-prem server management to mainly cloud work, my job happiness has skyrocketed. I haven't set foot in a data center in three years and I do not miss it one bit.

Dealing with hardware failures, hardware vendors, confusing licensing, having to know SKUs, racking new cabinets, swapping hard drives, patching servers - it's all awful work. When you go cloud only, you can be more productive instead of dealing with some of that nonsense work.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#353

Post by api »

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…

The entire ecosystem has been herded into complex deployment patterns that make it labor intensive to manage infrastructure without using managed cloud services.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#354

Post by ghaff »

danuker wrote: post #179
Dave3of5 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also the billing alerts is just that an alert. They should have something in place to put a hard cap on monthly spend. That way his free website would go offline when he's spent > $X. As you say they make it hard deliberately. Edit: Turn out Azure have this: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cost-management-billi...

I see there is a spending limit for the "intro" or "preview" plans designed for students, Visual Studio users, and resellers (the "hook" part in "hook, line, and sinker"). Not for actual cloud usage, like an actual pay-as-you-go plan where this would be useful. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/legal/offer-detail...

Yeah, there are trial accounts and things but as far as I know, none of the big cloud providers have a way to say "Under no circumstances are you to charge me for than $X per month even if it means shutting down services."

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#355

Post by carlivar »

adrianN wrote: post #160
omegalulw wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There is a size where on prem would be much cheaper on paper, but internal red tape for access to internal resources is such that teams are unnecessarily slowed down. For example I once worked at a place where it took several months to get an additional on-prem box to speed up our CI pipeline. Of course you can also add that amount of red tape to a cloud solution, but in my experience it's easier to get approval for…

Yes, this is the awkward phase of on-prem. Some companies stay there forever. Good companies will continue innovating and treat the time to resolution of your request as a KPI to reduce down to days, minutes, or even seconds.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#356

Post by TacticalCoder »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #241
hnbad wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is an irresponsible fad that people use cloud services for hobby projects (and despite its wide popularity I'm calling HIBP a hobby project since he's running it on the side for free) unless they have solid cloud ops experience from their day job. Cloud providers love it when people do this and are famously easy to talk to when you get an unexpected invoice high enough to require remortgaging your house to…

I don't know what the alternative is. Run a home server and pay an ISP $$$ for unusually high upload bandwidth/throughput? 99/100 times running it in the cloud is going to be cheaper, easier, and more resilient. Of course, the delayed sticker shock is a problem.. I think Google cloud actually lets you create a budget that turns services off if they go over, so there's a solution here if you run a hobby project that y…

> and pay an ISP $$$ for unusually high upload bandwidth/throughput?

But the ISPs I know do not bill $$$ if you use the max bandwidth (max bandwith they did advertize to you btw) for a sustained amount of time: they'll just start throttling you.

Anyway GP ain't asking about "cloud vs hosting at home" but about "cloud vs dedicated server(s)".

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#357

Post by _xnmw »

buro9 wrote: post #265
sascha_sl wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or simply use a proper CDN that doesn't pretend to eat all the cost for a flat fee but then sometimes does not. BunnyCDN has an amazing volume tier at half a cent per GB.

Oh exactly that. Or if caching is your biggest priority then Fastly or Akamai will shine too. But if you're balancing all considerations and want the cheap "good enough" caching with the DDoS protection, free TLS certs, and unmetered (assuming you aren't imgur or something)... then Cloudflare does a great job at being good enough. And for those sharp edges... drop in a proxy of your own, or layer your CDNs.

I don't understand, what is the advantage of Cloudflare over Fastly or Akamai if caching is not your biggest priority? Does Cloudflare have better DDoS protection, or something else?

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#360

Post by notreallyserio »

napolux wrote: post #344
TacticalCoder wrote: post #340

Are there cloud services that allow to easily put a maximum budget, to make sure you have no surprise costs like that?

In my experience you can only setup billing alerts, which are fair, if you ask me. I took a good course on pluralsight about AWS and the first lesson was to setup a billing alert. What will hard limits will do to your infra? You can't take down / suspend DBs, EC2s, etc... Just because you set a 1k USD limit and that's it. Alerts are the 1st thing you should setup IMHO

> You can't take down / suspend DBs, EC2s, etc... Just because you set a 1k USD limit and that's it.

You (the cloud provider) can shut down VMs, block access to all services, and just retain the content in storage until the bill is resolved or the account is permanently closed. The cost would be trivial as storage is dirt cheap.

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