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I got pwned by my cloud costs

troyhunt.com

371–380 of 657 posts

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#371
post #346
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…

IIRC, hertzner "unlimited" traffic isn't quite unlimited. You have a few monthly TB depending on what you contracted, if you go over it there's massive speed reductions until you pay a fee.

It's truly unlimited now. I know someone who's pushing 1Gbps constantly (selling Plex access) and Hetzner have no issues with it.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#373
post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are no savings with cloud, weaving or not. You want to waste money? Hire a car, with a driver, when you need it. Want to save money. Learn to drive. You always pay more for outsourcing stuff, a lot more, than doing it yourself. You can buy 1000x the processing power, by buying baremetal. You can get 100,000x more bandwith for cost, when not using the cloud. People think baremetal is hard. It isn't. It does take…

There are savings, but they require work to realize. Let's use your driving example (because car examples are always great!)... > You want to waste money? Hire a car, with a driver, when you need it. > Want to save money. Learn to drive. This is true. You can save more money if you need to drive often if you own a car. But there are two scenarios that it still makes sense to rent. 1) What if you need a car in a diffe…

I think you're taking his analogy further than he intended then are arguing against your version of his analogy.

Cloud was made for people who don't have the time, talent or desire to build and manage it in-house. You pay a premium for that convenience and that premium scales with your business growth via IT resource needs. I think that's what he was getting at in his analogy.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you configured your client to hide enough information, Cloudflare tends to believe you are a threat. VPN users probably have that problem a lot more.

And so Cloudflare becomes an enemy of privacy?

exactly. I care about privacy, and I do see that page often. Sometimes it helps to send a non-empty useragent string, or to enable javascript. Most of the time I just close the tab.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#375

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 I see that too I'll add that to my comment tbh I think what I said still stand it's been made hard or maybe said a different way is:

It's very easy to overspend on these big cloud providers

Oh I can't edit the comment now oh well sorry if I've confused anyone.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#376
post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 usin…

There are no savings with cloud, weaving or not. You want to waste money? Hire a car, with a driver, when you need it. Want to save money. Learn to drive. You always pay more for outsourcing stuff, a lot more, than doing it yourself. You can buy 1000x the processing power, by buying baremetal. You can get 100,000x more bandwith for cost, when not using the cloud. People think baremetal is hard. It isn't. It does take…

sure - but then also think about the use case - he is using a storage account, which means that inclusive in the cost is

a - replication (within region / AZ at least) b - 0 software to maintain (no need to frantically patch apache / SSL / whatever) c - super quick set up / management / logs / etc

So, yes, bare metal is (on a cpu cycle to cpu cycle / GB RAM/HDD/Bandwidth) level cheaper, but TCO can be waaaaaayyy higher.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#377
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…

good luck getting a gigabit speeds from a hetzner box in any form of consistency

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#378
post #346
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…

IIRC, hertzner "unlimited" traffic isn't quite unlimited. You have a few monthly TB depending on what you contracted, if you go over it there's massive speed reductions until you pay a fee.

In this case, that arguably would have been preferable.

A lot of cloud cost objections would be solved if they defaulted to that instead of defaulted to just charging you the fees. That has its own tradeoffs, of course, but I find myself suspicious that the reason the clouds work this way isn't so much a cold and sober consideration of the aforementioned tradeoffs so much as "this way makes more money when we charge people lots of money they weren't expecting" and "this way makes lots of money when the people deploying the service are organizationally and fiscally disconnected from the people paying for it so they care and notice less".

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#379

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 serv…

I think this depends. For OPS people no longer having to physically go into a DC I agree but you've now pushed a bunch of work developers especially now will have a harder time as they used to make code and there was someone who sorted infrastructure now the devs themselves are kept up all nights with AWS stuff going up and down.

If cloud improved QOL for ALL employees I'd agree but I think it just shifts work around and costs more.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#380
post #321
post #107

Don't put Cloudflare in front of a Cloud egress bill. i.e. don't do this: Azure|Amazon > Cloudflare Always use your own proxy where the egress is well within your free tier, i.e. do this: Azure|Amazon > Hetzner|Linode > Cloudflare Why? Because Cloudflare cache is a massively multi-tenant LRU cache and whilst hot files will be cached well (and with Cloudflare Tiered Cache even better - but this itself is a cost) anyth…

> Azure|Amazon > Hetzner|Linode > Cloudflare Why not directly Hetzner|Linode > Cloudflare?

So that you incur as much downtime risk as possible, obviously.

I hate these 'cloud economics' optimizations that people tend to try.

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