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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

#521

Post by DasIch »

metalliqaz wrote: post #507
ghaff wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly the cloud providers probably make money by not having hard limits. But it's also the case that if they did implement hard limits of some sort, you'd be reading blog posts about how AWS destroyed my project just when it was going big because someone stuck a circuit breaker foot gun in some corner and everything stopped working properly when usage spiked. I do think there should probably be a hard circuit bre…

But... they do implement limits.

They have limits on things like how many EC2 instances you can have but not on things like bandwidth.

While you can raise those limits by request I'm also not sure whether you can actually reduce them again later.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#522

Post by mrb »

Most worrying is that even an expert like Troy Hunt was UNABLE to figure out the cause of the issue by himself. He "reached out to a friend at Cloudflare" who investigated and found the cause.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#523

Post by 2ion »

This is why I use fixed price offerings for personal projects.

A large bill is probably chump change for someone like Troy, for others it's a year or two of savings. The risk is not worth it.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#524

Post by sylens »

0x008 wrote: post #42
stevehind wrote: post #5

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.

> Secondly, there's cost alerts. I really should have had this in place much earlier as it helps guard against any resource in Azure suddenly driving up the cost. He did not enable alerts.

Every online course that requires you to use a public cloud to deploy something should first have you set up a billing alert that notifies you when costs start to creep past something reasonable, like $20 or $50 (depending on the course and work involved).

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#526

Post by emptybottle »

This is why I personally won't run projects on infrastructure with what roughly equates to unlimited risk billing.

It's my opinion that it's better to work with known limitations and optimize for them.

In the case of bandwidth, work with a fixed pipe size, or do the math and set up a QoS that implements a throttle to avoid exceeding your bandwidth allotment.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#527

Post by Bedon292 »

Dave3of5 wrote: post #395
3pt14159 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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? Actually AWS won't help you here. I have literally been on a 2 day training course or aurora with AWS and the explanation of how to scale was actually just the same as any traditional non-cloud explanation. Correct usage of indexes, partitioning data, optimising queries (e…

There are two parts to this. You are correct that RDS doesn't help you with picking the index strategy, or optimizing queries. I don't see that as running the DB though, that is how you interact with it once its running. What it does do it help you reliably run the DB server itself.

Without any effort you can stand up a redundant, high availability deployment. With all of the data encrypted at rest. And configure nightly backups, which are stored on redundant storage in multiple physical locations and also encrypted. You can then restore those backups into a working system with the click of a button. Oh, and minor version patches happen automatically with no downtime. And you can click a button to do major version updates.

The last time I did analysis on it, which was a while ago, all of those features cost us less than 8 hours of my time each year. It would probably take more than 8 hours of my time each year just to handle security patches on the systems. Let alone the amount of engineering that it would take to get a system as redundant and reliable as a DB in RDS. I will happily pay them to take all of that off my plate so I can focus on other things, like optimizing the queries.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#529

Post by remram »

nightpool wrote: post #411
XCSme wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Azure|Amazon > Hetzner|Linode > Cloudflare Why not directly Hetzner|Linode > Cloudflare?

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.

If your cache is much smaller than the data, it will be ineffective, unless you think everyone keeps downloading the same tiny subset of files. That last assumption works for web content (e.g. newest articles see more hits) but probably not for data.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#530

Post by ghaff »

electroly wrote: post #467
kuu wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess big guys don't want they service to suddenly stop, so they probably would not use this... But it's just a guess

Absolutely that. Storage costs money, so in order to absolutely cap your spending they would have to delete all your stored data, too. Deleting S3 buckets and EBS volumes on a spending blip is absolutely the last thing any company with any budget at all wants to happen, ever. It would be preferable for that not to even be possible in any situation. This is the sort of thing that only extremely small casual users want…

I assume the sensible implementation would be cut off access and give you some period to settle your bill before the data is deleted.
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