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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

#491

Post by godot »

These stories almost always boil down to this fundamental conflict of what you want for a personal project vs a business. (though in this case yes, Troy Hunt's HIBP is larger than a lot of startup businesses)

In a business setting, you want your service to stay up, at the cost of spike in costs if accidents or mistakes happen.

In a personal project, you want there to be hard limit on cost, and your service to go down if spikes call for it. (I'm relatively sure that no one wants their personal projects to incur a bill of thousands of dollars by accident.)

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#492

Post by BlueTemplar »

Kneecaps07 wrote: post #352
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…

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…

It's not like all those jobs have been taken over by automation - someone still has to take care of these cloud servers ?

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#493

Post by martindbp »

buro9 wrote: 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…

I've switched to Backlaze B2, which has a bandwidth alliance with Cloudflare. Even without it, B2 egress is something like 1/5th of S3, so may be worth thinking about.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#494

Post by klohto »

edub wrote: post #488
buro9 wrote: 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.

You are not allowed to use Lightsail once you use more professional services on AWS atleast per ToS

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#495

Post by ipaddr »

nostrebored wrote: post #380
XCSme wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The risk that your service becomes faang popular and you suddenly need unlimited everything and need it immediately?

It is possible but highly unlikely. The more likely scenerio is you just continue overpay like a lot of others waiting for the moment. If that moment happens you realize with the sudden popularity your store inventory is sold out so you couldn't profit off of the extra traffic anyhow.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#497

Post by benbristow »

godot wrote: post #491

These stories almost always boil down to this fundamental conflict of what you want for a personal project vs a business. (though in this case yes, Troy Hunt's HIBP is larger than a lot of startup businesses) In a business setting, you want your service to stay up, at the cost of spike in costs if accidents or mistakes happen. In a personal project, you want there to be hard limit on cost, and your service to go down…

Azure (and I'm sure other cloud providers do) allow you to set email notifications for when your bill goes over a set amount so you can stop it before it happens.

If you're using a cloud provider I'd highly recommend setting one of those up.

In Azure it's under your Subscription and then Budgets

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#498

Post by Retric »

chasd00 wrote: post #483
Retric wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s assuming it’s a large increase in the bill for no reason.

It’s easy to justify having a larger bill with more traffic. “A retail store isn’t going to complain that they need to buy more stock after selling more stuff that’s just a cost of doing business.” Meanwhile it can be hard to justify a capital expenditure just because traffic increased.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#499

Post by bushbaba »

godot wrote: post #491

These stories almost always boil down to this fundamental conflict of what you want for a personal project vs a business. (though in this case yes, Troy Hunt's HIBP is larger than a lot of startup businesses) In a business setting, you want your service to stay up, at the cost of spike in costs if accidents or mistakes happen. In a personal project, you want there to be hard limit on cost, and your service to go down…

Isn’t that why services such as AWS lightsail and digital ocean exist?

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#500

Post by jrochkind1 »

sudhirj wrote: post #457
jrochkind1 wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloudfront isn't much discounted bandwidth out compared to S3 though, is it? I see S3 is initial $0.09/GB, going down to $0.07 after 50TB or $0.05 after 150TB. Cloudfront North America is $0.085 for first 10TB; but $0.110 and up for other regions. going down to $0.060 north america after 100TB, and okay $0.025 after 1PB. (but $0.050 and up in other regions even after 1PB). So okay, Cloudfront gets cheaper egress at l…

The reserved capacity pricing is lower, in a business setting your account manager will usually suggest this pretty quickly if you have a steady and/or increasing Cloudfront bill.

Oh I didn't even know about that, thanks! Something else for me to look into.
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