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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

#421

Post by COM2323 »

viraptor wrote: post #210
welterde wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably would run just fine on a <= 4 euro/month virtual machine too. Of course it doesn't quite scale to zero like APIGW,lambda,etc. but on the other hand you can be fairly confident to not pay more if your pet project suddenly lands on the front page of HN.

Keep in mind that the "<= 4 euro/month virtual machine" has maybe 256MB of RAM available and running anything beyond nginx + a web server which needs to be cycled every few days due to memory fragmentation can become challenging. I've tried this many times, but it's just not worth the extra hassle. And I want a vpn, monitoring and database even on the toy project server as a minimum in reality.

Contabo has €5 VPS with 4 cores, 8 GB RAM and 200GB SSD. The one I have runs multiple Valhaim servers that are constanly hammering the CPU, some .NET webs etc. and it's fine.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#422

Post by ketanip »

NicoJuicy wrote: post #194
fs111 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Cloudflare is a partner of Azure ( or vice versa). = Azure has an integration to use cloudflare for the cdn. https://www.cloudflare.com/multi-cloud/azure/

Cloudflare Bandwidth Alliance.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#423

Post by jollybean »

southerntofu wrote: post #238
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…

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…

"I really don't understand the cloud craze"

The opposite, I don't understand why anyone would ever put up a server if they didn't have to.

It's not 'processing power' that's going to be the 'big cost' for most projects.

It's headcount and salary.

If you can materially improve the operating ability of your company, then a few $K in cloud fees is dirt cheap.

I used to work at a 'tech company' that made a physical product and our IT was abysmal. We had to wait weeks for our sysadmins to order blades, get things set up, there were outages etc..

If a project is definitely going to be 'a few linux servers and never more' - even then it would be cheaper and more reasonable to use virtual instances.

The time to 'roll your own' is when the infra. operating costs are a material part of your business.

For example, 'Dropbox' invariably had to roll their own infra, that was inevitable.

Similarly others.

That said - as this article indicates, it's easy to 'over do it' and end up in ridiculous amounts of complexity.

The Amazon IAM security model has always been bizarre and confusing, and the number of AWS services is mind-boggling.

But the core case of EC2+S3 +Networking, and then maybe a couple of other enhanced services for special case works fine.

I also object to what I think is a vast overuse of Cloudflare, I just don't believe that in most scenarios needing to have content at the edge really changes the experience that much.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#424

Post by hogrider »

I wonder if people will start to make shell companies to just go brankrupt when this happens and start afresh with another company. The cloud vendor doesn't look too closely ehat you are running right? So this could work.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#425

Post by lazyant »

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…

If you only need a server, as in CPU, RAM, disk and bandwidth, with a more or less constant demand, then sure, a dedicated server is way cheaper than any cloud. You want to use cloud for the ecosystem of other services besides VM/instances, and especially to use them in an automated way. The other use case is elastic demand.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#426

Post by ketanip »

api wrote: post #362
brodouevencode wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everything is more complex to debug, more expensive, and more shitty in all the possible ways you can imagine. Coming from traditional infrastructure and development methods, you're mostly right. Part of the expectation of the cloud is that you do things _their way_. And even then each cloud provider does things a little differently. However, if you're willing to subscribe to the way of doing things it (and you'll…

> networking setup is free/cheap/doesn't require a Cisco cert. you can trust a developer to set things up. Bare metal hosts set up the network for you. You may need to know how to configure a local network interface. Even if you actually rack and stack many colos will give you a drop with network set up. You don't need to do what you describe unless you are building your own DC. > object storage is so much easier tha…

Datapacket shows Discord on their customer list, I didn't know discord used VPS / Bare Metal or is it like they just tried it once and Datapacket struck their name to their landing page ?

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#427

Post by laurent92 »

abakker wrote: post #406
usrbinbash wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People think baremetal is hard. It isn't. It does take knowledge. This. I always wonder how much of the "clouds" success (economic, that is) would have materialized, if the marketing term never got traction, and everyone just called it what it really is: "renting someone elses hardware without physical access, and less, if any, control over how the stack works from the metal up". In the good 'ol days, when people w…

No, no. The costs cloud saves are in staffing and opportunity costs. Everyone knows that it is more expensive than a comparable server, but...it is easy, standard, and available. If you want to a) not have real estate capex, b) not worry about the core ops part of your applications, and c) used to outsource infrastructure to a managed service provider anyway, then Cloud is a viable value prop. Plus, the more of the s…

And better credibility when you say “Our vulnerability was on AWS and configuration is hard, but at least we had the default VPC config” rather than “We maintained our own stack and being sysadmin is hard, and the port was exposed on the web.”

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#428

Post by jollybean »

pdimitar wrote: post #403
api wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> networking setup is free/cheap/doesn't require a Cisco cert. you can trust a developer to set things up. Bare metal hosts set up the network for you. You may need to know how to configure a local network interface. Even if you actually rack and stack many colos will give you a drop with network set up. You don't need to do what you describe unless you are building your own DC. > object storage is so much easier tha…

Haven't even heard of DataPacket, thanks for the link! And yeah I agree about the "some services are super low cost so you get hooked" thing. Always been my impression of Amazon: they look for what they can apply scale savings on (usually object storage, it seems) and make it cheap and then over-charge for almost everything else.

That's not really it.

The funny business in Amazon's pricing is their Egress Bandwidth, everything is rational.

You're looking at the pricing from a 'cost plus' perspective which is not generally how things are priced.

AWS core use case is IT departments being able to offload all of their infra.

It's a massive, massive advantage. It's so, so much easier and more flexible to use AWS that there is no comparison. It's a 'no brainer' from a cost perspective, which is why, cost usually isn't a barrier with AWS.

Cost only becomes a primary issue when the margin of AWS services is reflected in the cost of the product itself, i.e. when you are hosting a lot of content.

So if you are Phizer, and your IT department uses AWS, the cost is irrelevant.

If you are Dropbox, selling storage for $X/Gigabyte, and your competitors are reducing their prices and you're giving all of your margin to AWS, then you have to do something, i.e. 'make your own infra'.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#429

Post by hogrider »

bluedino wrote: post #316

Reminds me of a time, we had a new site that was going to run on GCP, we had been using a couple co-located servers for years. When everything was moved to production, URL went live, nobody ever did any kind of bandwidth checking, caching, no CDN, no cost tracking. $10,000 in our first week. That's about 1/4 what our total spend on the co-located servers was for the whole year. Boss flipped his lid and wanted to kill…

Awful toxic boss.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#430

Post by Ostrogodsky »

martinald wrote: post #260
3pt14159 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see both sides. If you're a startup that needs to be able to scale quickly if product market fit is achieved, the cloud really saves your bacon. Or is your ten person team really going to figure out how to get Postgres to reliably run with billions of records, with encrypted backups, etc? It's basically a form of permanent debt. Faster product market fit, higher long term infrastructure costs until you have eno…

I don't disagree; but I think the cloud (AWS/Azure/GCP) have sort of shielded people from how cheap/powerful the underlying hardware has became. For ~100eur/month on hertzner you can get a 16core Zen3, 128GB RAM with 8TB of NVMe SSD. Unless your stack is horrendously badly optimised you can serve SO MUCH traffic off that - definitely billions of postgres records without breaking a sweat. So the scale argument somewha…

> For ~100eur/month on hertzner you can get a 16core Zen3, 128GB RAM with 8TB of NVMe SSD.

What option is that? The closest I see is the CCX41, but that is 40% more expensive, 140 Eur/month, half the RAM (64 GB) and ~4% of the disk space (360 GB)

https://www.hetzner.com/cloud

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