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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

#571

Post by cma »

kuu wrote: post #257
cma wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They'd rather refund small guys for mistakes than give big guys an easy limit to set.

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

For background batch jobs and analytics etc. they might want caps. Say something like a video transcoding workload. And lots of things could benefit not from a cap, but some kind of gradual degradation in bandwidth/instance allocation + a warning so you can raise the limits, it doesn't have to just shut everything down immediately using a hard cap.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#572

Post by lytefm »

kortilla wrote: post #514
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…

> In a business setting, you want your service to stay up, at the cost of spike in costs if accidents or mistakes happen. No you don’t. This is absolutely not a given. Being a “business” doesn’t mean you suddenly have unlimited budget. The vast majority of businesses are not “web scale” and are better off taking an availability outage than suddenly handling 1,000,000x the normal volume of traffic.

I'd say that it definitely depends on the business.

If you are selling you product via your web site and you're suddenly on TV with millions watching and accessing your site, you definitely don't want the server to go downand autoscaling + a bit higher cost would be great.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#573

Post by andrewxdiamond »

mcbain wrote: post #133
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…

That stackoverflow infra blog post is out of date. They use more than a single webserver now. For example: https://stackexchange.com/performance

Most importantly, SO is extremely read-heavy, write-lite, and cache-friendly.

A similar “scale” e-commerce site would be significantly more load, have more dynamic data, and just be overall harder to run.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#574

Post by lytefm »

avrionov wrote: post #130
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…

I worked on both cloud computing and on premise project. Before cloud computing the risks were different: - much harder to scale. It was much more common to over provision and have machines and bandwidth being unused for years. - when we were hit with very high traffic due to a bug or something else, most of the time it would lead to customer outages. Based on the contract some times it requires to pay back because S…

> It was much more common to over provision and have machines and bandwidth being unused for years.

But the overprovisioned server might still be a lot cheaper than the cloud bill. It can be totally reasonable to have a server running at 1-5% load 98% of the time if you really need the capacity for the remaining 2%.

Also, neither "scaling up" as in "re-deploying the same setup on a beefier instance" nor "scaling out" as in "let's expand to the US and have a server there" is too difficult if the setup is automated (Ansible).

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#575

Post by fragmede »

kortilla wrote: post #519
Kneecaps07 wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This reads like a software engineer being happy work caters lunch so he/she didn’t have to cook for the whole team anymore. Didn’t anyone discuss maybe hiring a cook?

Yes but soon then you're running a kitchen and then a cafe and catering business, as well as a software startup. Which, given how many startups had in-office lunch/food pre-covid is maybe not a bad way to think of that.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#576

Post by Bedon292 »

jjav wrote: post #559
Bedon292 wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 nig…

> Without any effort you can stand up a redundant, high availability deployment. Yes, it is seductive. Sometimes worth it. But realize you'll be paying monthly in perpetuity for the convenience of that one-time setup which could've been done a a few days, give or take. > all of those features cost us less than 8 hours of my time each year I'm surprised! Our RDS costs are about 10 engineering hours per month (120 eng/…

I should clarify that the 8 hours was above and beyond the costs of running it yourself on AWS. So that is not counting the 2x ec2 instances, plus the minor s3 and elb costs. Didn't really run the numbers for equivalent hardware elsewhere, since that wasn't an option for us. Eyeballing it real quick right now, its still maybe an hour / month vs other places for the hardware. It is a relatively small instance though, saving probably are much better as it gets to larger sizes. Pre-paying for reserved instances helps here as well.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#577

Post by Symbiote »

lytefm wrote: post #572
kortilla wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In a business setting, you want your service to stay up, at the cost of spike in costs if accidents or mistakes happen. No you don’t. This is absolutely not a given. Being a “business” doesn’t mean you suddenly have unlimited budget. The vast majority of businesses are not “web scale” and are better off taking an availability outage than suddenly handling 1,000,000x the normal volume of traffic.

I'd say that it definitely depends on the business. If you are selling you product via your web site and you're suddenly on TV with millions watching and accessing your site, you definitely don't want the server to go downand autoscaling + a bit higher cost would be great.

Only if you can actually fulfil those orders. If your production can't be increased, and the business is small, the cost could far outweigh the potential profit.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#578

Post by InvaderFizz »

edub wrote: post #506
klohto wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Interesting. In this example where the parent comment discusses using a proxy from AWS to Linode/Hetzner to Cloudflare, then I'd go with someone in the Bandwidth Alliance, which would include Linode and Vultr.

Have either of those actually implemented Bandwidth Alliance? Last I looked(few months ago), the only outfit that had actually done anything on that was Backblaze. Vultr and Linode were nothing more than announcements with no actual cost savings for customers implemented.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#579

Post by pojzon »

ddlutz wrote: post #538
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…

Why not use the CDN of the cloud provider you are on? Azure Storage > Azure CDN

Because its order pf magnitude more expensive like anything on the cloud really..

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#580

Post by canucker2016 »

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…

Or Troy Hunt can ping his Cloudflare contacts and see if he can get access to Cloudflare R2 Storage.

see https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-r2-object-storage/

From the Cloudflare blog, it seems R2 would've handled this exact situation - auto-migration of cloud S3-like-storage objects - download from cloud-storage just once and cache in R2 for Cloudflare to serve.

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