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I got pwned by my cloud costs

troyhunt.com

51–60 of 657 posts

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#51

Have you contacted Azure? On one hand you owe the money “fair and square”, but on the other if I were them I’d waive an unexpected $10k bill to a good faith actor that was incurred without any proactive notification by Azure.

A developer on a team I worked with many years ago accidentally committed our AWS keys in a repo. Got a $30k bill due to a an enormous amount of EC2-instances being spawned. We contacted AWS and they were very understanding and reduced the bill to $50.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#53

Have you contacted Azure? On one hand you owe the money “fair and square”, but on the other if I were them I’d waive an unexpected $10k bill to a good faith actor that was incurred without any proactive notification by Azure.

I got an $800 aws expense (one line item) waived after I contacted them and they asked me to explain why it happened and how I’ll prevent it from happening in the future. I think it’s a once per account thing they’d probably do and Troy should definitely do it.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#54

First thing i do is set an alert when costs go over 10$ for any new project. Highly recommend

Do you also make sure you never go on vacation, never go anywhere that doesn't have a phone signal, never turn off your phone, that your alerts have multiple levels of redundancy, and that you always have access to a computer to modify settings?

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#55

Have you contacted Azure? On one hand you owe the money “fair and square”, but on the other if I were them I’d waive an unexpected $10k bill to a good faith actor that was incurred without any proactive notification by Azure.

Yep, we had an incident with Mongo cloud where a bug in their synchronization protocols for Mongo Realm resulted in an insane amount of traffic. This was a development cluster with almost no application load somehow pumping around many TB over the course of a few days. The bill was many thousands of dollars. Their support did the right thing. And we actually ended up with some credits because we were having a rough time with bugs in their software. Ultimately, we gave up on Mongo Realm because it was just not working as advertised for us (high CPU usage on the device, lots of bandwidth, we experienced data loss in the managed cloud storage, etc.). But their support team was great.

Their interests is keeping you as a long term customer. So, they will help you if they can. Unexpectedly high bills like that can end the relation in no time. And 10K is not a lot on a yearly basis. That's a few months of normal usage for lots of companies. So, protecting that revenue is worth something to them. That's also worth realizing when you deal with cloud providers: you are spending non trivial amounts of money on their services and support is part of that deal.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#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, I just don't understand why people use cloud services.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#57
post #47

One thing I hate about the cloud providers is that there isn't an option to set a maximum cost. I would prefer to plug the cable of my side project than just receive an email saying me that next bill is going to be over my cost. I understand not everyone would like to do that, but I would like to have that option.

I assume you meant “pull” or “unplug” the cable :)

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#59
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…

You are not wrong. Hetzner would be a good choice instead.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#60
This prompted me to go and check my custom static site generator (which renders my blog onto an Azure storage account exposed via HTTP and Cloudflare).

Turns out I wasn't setting x-ms-cache-control when writing all the blobs, so that's a win right there.

(interestingly, it appears that rclone, which I was in the process of moving to, doesn't do that, so I might have to keep my custom Azure storage library around)

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