I got pwned by my cloud costs • Hacker News Board

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#441

Post by phkahler » Mon, Jan 24, 2022, 4:21 PM UTC

b112 wrote: post #347

windexh8er wrote: post #339

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…

It's the "weaving" part that has non-specific cost. If you have skill at weaving together pieces of the cloud in an optimal way, you can save money. Just like if you have skill in putting together your own infrastructure you can save money. I can see spending money on services, but I don't understand why people invest brain capacity on vendor-specific solutions.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#442

Post by OrderlyTiamat » Mon, Jan 24, 2022, 4:25 PM UTC

harry8 wrote: post #68

tpetry wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every cloud makes this mistake easy! You have to manually activate billing alerts for everyone because they want you to spend more snd more each month. I am still waiting for a cloud without these dark patterns. But that will never happen because it‘s leaving a big amount of money on the table by not being hostile.

Dark patterns - this sounds like a colour scheme you don't care for. "Predatory death-trap pricing" captures the spirit of the thing with rather more clarity. It is wholly intentional after all.

> Dark patterns - this sounds like a colour scheme you don't care for.

I can see your point- if I'd never seen the term before I might have a similar reaction. But it's quite a common term now I think.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#443

Post by ryanjkirk » Mon, Jan 24, 2022, 4:30 PM UTC

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…

You're correct on staffing savings, but not on Ops savings.

I delved into this pretty thoroughly last month - https://medium.com/@rykrk/everything-is-just-build-vs-buy-d7...

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#444

Post by jatone » Mon, Jan 24, 2022, 4:30 PM UTC

neffy wrote: post #440

dylan604 wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You want to waste money? Hire a car, with a driver, when you need it. > Want to save money. Learn to drive. Oh please. As if learning to drive is the end of expenses. If you finance a car, you have monthly payments. If you don't, then you have periodic recurring maintenance bills. You always have fuel charges. You always have insurance charges. You periodically have parking charges. I know how to drive, but do not o…

This is probably true in the states where it is insanely cheap to rent cars, but not necessarily everywhere. And even there... ... I run a junker. That is to say a car that will go the dump as soon as it requires any significant expenditure, and the combination saving of not having to finance it, and most years minimal or no repairs, and only needing third party insurance makes it significantly cheaper than renting.

depends on how frequently you need a car. I drive maybe 3 times a year. that's ~2k in gas/rent fees. that's less than insurance assuming each rental is for a week. never mind the cost of actually buying the car.

in practice I spend maybe 1k every year for cars. primarily for vacation. which owning a car wouldn't absolve me from spending.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#445

Post by kingcharles » Mon, Jan 24, 2022, 4:37 PM UTC

technion wrote: post #64

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…

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...

Huh. As an MVP myself (of DRM lol) I have to agree that was a poor astroturfing idea of Microsoft's. Although one employee != Microsoft. In all my MVP years Microsoft has never asked me to do anything like that. They've sent me to cool parties and events, but never asked for me to do anything as a result.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#446

Post by Godel_unicode » Mon, Jan 24, 2022, 4:40 PM UTC

capableweb wrote: post #196

yetihehe wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never do. Maybe you or something on your computer or network is the problem?

Usually it's because they live in a different country than what people consider the "Western World" or something like that. When I'm in Europe, I don't see that page very often, unless in Eastern Europe. But if I'm in Asia, Africa or Central/South America, then I encounter that page all the time.

Fwiw, this is an option that many people configure for themselves in cloudflare. Some security people love recommending using IP geo-blocking as a good tactic for hardening systems.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#447

Post by ryanjkirk » Mon, Jan 24, 2022, 4:45 PM UTC

mugsie wrote: post #376

b112 wrote: 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…

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 highe…

Yes, TCO can be higher, depending where you are on the curve of capex, amortization, and staffing costs. Don't forget you still need at least Developers, DevOps, and Security. If you're inefficient at cloud, spinning up ec2s left and right, using a lot of egress, storing a lot of hot/live data, your total cost is much higher, and will easily be more than the salary of that one sysadmin, or team of systems engineers, you would pay to maintain the colo space.

You have to do a lot of things right to get that Cloud Value, as the author of this blog post has shown. You have to do a lot of things right to get value out of on-prem bare metal as well, but those things are generally well-known, standardized, have less moving parts, and people with decades of experience and knowledge of best practices. The opposite of the current cloud landscape.

TCO is not a straight line.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#448

Post by chasd00 » Mon, Jan 24, 2022, 4:49 PM UTC

Dave3of5 wrote: post #390

mcbain wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That stackoverflow infra blog post is out of date. They use more than a single webserver now. For example: https://stackexchange.com/performance

Looks like they have actually reduces their footprint. It not that they do run on a single webserver it's that they can run on one.

> Looks like they have actually reduces their footprint.

i don't remember who said it but a quote i really like is "it's not finished when there's nothing left to add, it's finished when there's nothing left to take away"

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#449

Post by dijit » Mon, Jan 24, 2022, 4:50 PM UTC

nightpool wrote: post #415

dijit wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now they have 9. They still serve a lot more traffic than I do and I have hundreds of instances; thousands of containers.

You have thousands of containers? Physician, heal thyself.

I mean, at my last job I had thousands of physical machines too.

Scale can depend on many things.

Here's a couple of reasons why it can easily be thousands:

1) Cronjobs, CI jobs, ETL, FaaS are all systems that exist. What used to be a process is now a container. (one need only check the PID count on their local machine to know that this can be many quite easily).

2) Microservices; I'm a larger fan of fat "services" but doing actual micro services tends to leave you with a lot of containers running

3) Actual compute need. If my original hosting strategy was thousands of machines, well, I'm going to have thousands of containers, if not more.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#450

Post by jpgvm » Mon, Jan 24, 2022, 4:51 PM UTC

_xnmw wrote: post #357

buro9 wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes among other things. Also edge compute, etc.

Fastly comes close on a lot of fronts (and does better at a few things) but unless you are godlike with Varnish scripting it's a lot harder to make it do what you want than Cloudflare.