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I got pwned by my cloud costs

troyhunt.com

481–490 of 657 posts

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#481
post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

All I can see is maybe the AX101? It matches all the specs they put down, although the SSD is RAID 1 @ 4TB total. https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ax101

Yes, 8TB total but in RAID. Also keep in mind Hertnzer quotes prices VAT inclusive, whereas most clouds add VAT on top. For US customers you can take ~20% off those prices.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if the disk on a $40 Hetzner server would be fast/big enough for him. All the searching and storing of massive password hash collections. He has a writeup here on how he gets costs down in a big way: https://www.troyhunt.com/serverless-to-the-max-doing-big-thi...

I tried to scan through the linked article (and OP) but couldn't quite figure out Troy's storage requirements. Are they really massive? The sum of the GB figured shown in the OP doesn't even amount to 200GB AFAICT. But even if it's something like 10TB that's still not super expensive on many hosting providers.

The post wasn't relating to data but more this quote:

> It's costing me 2.6c per day to support 141M monthly queries of 517M records.

Also, you might be able to store 1TB of data on a spinning disk with no problem but can you run the amount of queries he needs? Will you be able to run them as fast as you need? How much RAM would you need? etc.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#483
post #309

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…

Most people that use cloud computing aren’t stuck with the bills the companies they work for are. As to difficulty, they “solve” organizational problems by avoiding sticker shock when someone wants 100+k in equip that’s often a huge number of hoops to jump through and possibly months of delays, a giant bill every month and nobody a complains about the electric bill etc.

> Most people that use cloud computing aren’t stuck with the bills the companies they work for are.

you can rest assured that even the largest company will come looking for the person responsible for increasing an expense by that large of a percentage. So maybe it doesn't come out of your personal checking account but you will certainly pay for it.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#484
post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That's right, auto-scaling comes with this problem, but at least you removed one extra service/point of failure.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#485

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…

> > £1 million per year

I'm curious about your workload. I tend to only use cloud for workloads where it's either (1) by far the only feasible option (e.g. need GPUs for short periods of time), or else (2) basically free.

> I mean I'm not against cloud it's just not the cheapest option

This is certainly true for most workloads. It's also true that buying is better than renting, but here I am living in a rented apartment.

The logic from on high might be something like "if demand is uncertain and capex is risky, why buy when you can rent?"

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#486
post #434

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/

Out of curiosity I tried to look up their pricing and the first thing I am greeted with when launching their price calculator is "you must allow functional cookies".

I disabled all shields for their side and still the same thing. Waste of time

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So that you incur as much downtime risk as possible, obviously. I hate these 'cloud economics' optimizations that people tend to try.

The best setup will forever remain Heroku free instance tier with a free Pingdom account providing traffic to keep it from getting shutdown

Free heroku as a maximum number of hours a day. The ping hack isn’t working anymore.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#488
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…

If you're going to have an intermediary proxy that you run, for AWS perhaps use Lightsail. It is price competitive, and includes more bandwidth than Linode/DigitalOcean/Vultr for the price.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#489
post #486
post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Out of curiosity I tried to look up their pricing and the first thing I am greeted with when launching their price calculator is "you must allow functional cookies". I disabled all shields for their side and still the same thing. Waste of time

I personally never used Linode and can not recommend nor talk against it, I was just pointing out that if you want scalable solutions AWS is not the only answer.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#490
post #420
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even if you run a relatively opaque cost structure business like a restaurant, you can still calculate the maximum cost of ingredients for one month, the salaries, energy, etc. If the restaurant suddenly ordered ten thousand times more ingredients than usual, their supplier would probably call back and say "is that really what you want?" rather than just shrugging and shipping them tonnes of tomatoes with a bill fo…

In this scenario though you’ve used tonnes of tomatoes and they’re now asking you to pay

Tomatoes that were ordered on terms where they’re paid for well after they’re delivered, with a long-running relationship with the vendor. If you went from ordering a few tomatoes to ordering entire lorries full of them, you bet the vendor’s going to check you’re good to pay for them.

Troy Hunt didn’t sneak into an Azure DC and install some hardware any more than this hypothetical restaurateur filled a truck at the local fruit market.

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