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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

#471

Post by nightpool »

dijit wrote: post #449
nightpool wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" b…

Sure, but the implied message of your comment that you were saying you could replace all of your instances and containers with just 9 machines, since StackOverflow "serves a lot more traffic than you do" (i.e. "has more actual compute need"). I think most reasonable engineers would say that "thousands" of containers would be a massive mistake to use for that size of task, even if few of them would go to the extent that Stack Overflow did of using only 9 machines.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#472

Post by ska »

fastball wrote: post #22
scrollaway wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re trying to be snarky to GP, why exactly? Yes there are bad faith actors that might try to get some free cash out of cloud refunds. And other customers can also be good faith actors and included in the assertion. The post applies to everyone and I’d second it. Ask nicely for a refund in these situations, the worst that can happen is they say no. Where did they say that “only Troy Hunt shall receive a refund, for…

The point is that if they give refunds to all the good actors they won't make any money.

> The point is that if they give refunds to all the good actors they won't make any money.

That assumes the only way they make money is on peoples understandable mistakes or lack of care. Doesn't seem to be the case for these services (unlike, say, many gym subscriptions).

It seems far more likely that if they refunded all the well documented issues like this one, their bottom line wouldn't be impacted.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#473

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

3pt14159 wrote: post #140
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…

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…

> 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?

Most of the problems here will be DBA problems like understanding query plans and such. Even with AWS RDB, I’ve had to upload various setting files to tweak tunables to get things working.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#474

Post by BlueTemplar »

fuzzy2 wrote: post #84
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…

That dedicated server you have to manage (ensure security, install the software you need, keep it updated and secure etc). It’s not for everyone. Also, as you can see in a screenshot on TFA: Some services are simply dirt cheap. The storage account and its various “sub-services” is such a thing. It’s hard to compete with dedicated hardware here. Depending on your dedicated hosting provider, the traffic cost trap exist…

Arguably Hetzner is a cloud operator too. I guess it's a spectrum...

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#475

Post by throwawaygh »

XCSme wrote: post #434
nightpool wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Hetzner and Linode VPSs have fixed disk sizes, while Azure and AWS have basically infinite storage. You use your cheap commodity VPS as a cache, not a source-of-truth.

You can use block storage for scalable disk size: https://www.linode.com/products/block-storage/

But then you're right back to the cloud billing problem, right?

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#476

Post by sparselogic »

nova22033 wrote: post #267
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…

our department now spend > £1 million per year to AWS in hosting costs. A 20% reduction in those fees could pay for a few sysadmin(s). You can hire a "few" sysadmins for 200k/year?

A 20% reduction would result in ~£800k/yr.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#477

Post by bstpierre »

suction wrote: post #36

I wonder if before cloud computing, has there ever been a successful product / service where it was accepted with just a shrug that the volatility of monthly costs means it could bankrupt you with next month's bill, because of complexities and opaqueness of the cost structure make it virtually impossible to predict and protect against extreme peaks in all parts of the setup. Even if you run a relatively opaque cost s…

A gas or electric bill works a bit like this... if you have some appliance that fails in a way that suddenly starts consuming much more than usual you can end up with a fairly large bill at the end of the month. Same for old school landlines or cell phones, before flat rate billing became ubiquitous.

Though in those cases the billing isn't really complex or opaque, and you _can_ monitor it if you care to check your meter regularly throughout the month. But, for the electrical case anyway, you can't drill into what exactly is consuming watts without either fancy monitoring equipment or potentially tedious investigation.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#478

Post by mathattack »

Think about how many big companies struggle with his. Most don’t have one person who can think through the cost of the cloud, as well as the activities to manage the costs. Many even say “Let engineers be engineers, and business people own the costs.” And all of a sudden you get a ton of surprises…

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#479

Post by BonoboIO »

Well ... it's not like it was the first time this happened to a software developer.

He should have known better that there is a risk, that you don't know some detail that costs you a lot of money.

Cloud Bandwidth is soooooooooo expensive. If there is a risk that you have to pay this, please us a provider like Hetzner with fixed costs. If you like your serverless things, just host the big files at Hetzner.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#480

Post by macintux »

bstpierre wrote: post #477
suction wrote: post #36

I wonder if before cloud computing, has there ever been a successful product / service where it was accepted with just a shrug that the volatility of monthly costs means it could bankrupt you with next month's bill, because of complexities and opaqueness of the cost structure make it virtually impossible to predict and protect against extreme peaks in all parts of the setup. Even if you run a relatively opaque cost s…

A gas or electric bill works a bit like this... if you have some appliance that fails in a way that suddenly starts consuming much more than usual you can end up with a fairly large bill at the end of the month. Same for old school landlines or cell phones, before flat rate billing became ubiquitous. Though in those cases the billing isn't really complex or opaque, and you _can_ monitor it if you care to check your m…

> A gas or electric bill works a bit like this

Just ask Texans.

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