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I got pwned by my cloud costs

troyhunt.com

621–630 of 657 posts

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A gas or electric bill works a bit like this... if you have some appliance that fails in a way that suddenly starts consuming much more than usual you can end up with a fairly large bill at the end of the month. Same for old school landlines or cell phones, before flat rate billing became ubiquitous. Though in those cases the billing isn't really complex or opaque, and you _can_ monitor it if you care to check your m…

The big difference in case of gas or electric (or even telephone) is that you and only you are in control. Someone would have to physically break into your house or steal your phone to rack up a huge bill. In contrast, with the cloud the bill is directly proportional to the amount of inbound requests from the Internet, with no out of the box way to implement a limit (I guess you could install Apache/Nginx and enforce…

Some cell plans have a charge for incoming texts, roughly like the cloud bill you’re talking about.

And (as sibling comment points out) if you’ve got critical household infrastructure that needs gas/electric, you’re not always in control. An unexpected hard freeze could provide you with a big bill next month and you can’t fully control it.

I agree with you that there’s definitely a difference of scale and asymmetry but the concept of unpredictable postpaid bills is not a new thing.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#622
post #538
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

Azure CDN offers almost no discount on egress over Azure storage directly. The same is the case with Amazon's equivalent services.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#623
post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a more detailed citation for that? At $DAYJOB we seem to be using Lightsail (for non-cache purposes) along with some "real AWS" resources without a problem,

AWS Service Terms[0] 51. Amazon Lightsail 51.3. You may not use Amazon Lightsail in a manner intended to avoid incurring data fees from other Services (e.g., proxying network traffic from Services to the public internet or other destinations or excessive data processing through load balancing or content delivery network (CDN) Services as described in the Documentation), and if you do, we may throttle or suspend your…

I think you’re expanding this clause past what it says.

The clause prohibits you from using Lightsail to cheat other services. So, per their example, you couldn’t set up a Lightsail instance as a reverse proxy between the internet and an ELB, to take advantage of Lightsail’s higher transfer quotas and “in-region” traffic from Lightsail to ELBs.

Hosting a site on Lightsail and hosting other things on other AWS services is fine.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#624
post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a more detailed citation for that? At $DAYJOB we seem to be using Lightsail (for non-cache purposes) along with some "real AWS" resources without a problem,

AWS Service Terms[0] 51. Amazon Lightsail 51.3. You may not use Amazon Lightsail in a manner intended to avoid incurring data fees from other Services (e.g., proxying network traffic from Services to the public internet or other destinations or excessive data processing through load balancing or content delivery network (CDN) Services as described in the Documentation), and if you do, we may throttle or suspend your…

That's insane. But not a surprise, lightsail only exists so aws can say they offer similar pricing to Linode/DigitalOcean/Vultr/etc... as long as you don't ever plan to grow

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#625
post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes among other things. Also edge compute, etc. Fastly comes close on a lot of fronts (and does better at a few things) but unless you are godlike with Varnish scripting it's a lot harder to make it do what you want than Cloudflare.

OPs use case is a couple giant zip files. Edge compute is real cool, but not something a lot of people need when they think of CDN.

I interpreted the question as "if caching -isn't- your biggest priority". i.e what does it do better assuming giant zip files isn't the main thing you are interested in.

So I'm not really responding to OP but rather the commenter I replied to. :)

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#626
post #623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS Service Terms[0] 51. Amazon Lightsail 51.3. You may not use Amazon Lightsail in a manner intended to avoid incurring data fees from other Services (e.g., proxying network traffic from Services to the public internet or other destinations or excessive data processing through load balancing or content delivery network (CDN) Services as described in the Documentation), and if you do, we may throttle or suspend your…

I think you’re expanding this clause past what it says. The clause prohibits you from using Lightsail to cheat other services. So, per their example, you couldn’t set up a Lightsail instance as a reverse proxy between the internet and an ELB, to take advantage of Lightsail’s higher transfer quotas and “in-region” traffic from Lightsail to ELBs. Hosting a site on Lightsail and hosting other things on other AWS service…

I am not the OP. The terms indicate you cannot use it to proxy traffic to bypass bandwidth costs. The grandparent comment suggested using Lightsail to do this, and it is a violation of the TOS. The parent comment, however, stipulated that you are not allowed to use Lightsail at all, which is indeed wrong. I was just posting the relevant portion of the TOS which applies to the grandparent comment, and clarifies on the parent comment (which is inaccurate)

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you use argo caching on Cloudflare, it should reduce origin server load even more. Essentially, instead of going directly to your origin, cloudflare endpoint will first reach to it's root node to see if it's cached there and only that node is allowed to communicate with your origin. I see like ~95% cache hits with that turned on.

Argo does not affect caching, only performance. You're maybe mistaking it for tiered caching or a custom caching topology.

Yes, they call it Argo Tiered Cache under Caching tab.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#628

Cloud providers should always have a max spend and it should be a standard feature. The cap shouldn't even be some optional feature or notification service. It should be a hard cap that you can move - at your own risk.

SMB or indie developers are not the first/primary customers for Azure/AWS that they design their application for. Any enterprise will not want any limits because of spends, they would be lot more pissed if service was pulled because spending cap set by someone sometime in the past is now exceeded. Likely is why such feature is optional not mandatory. Excess/unexpected billing would be negotiated in typical sales cycl…

I 100% work for a large enterprise and we would absolutely like spending policies in place. After all, we have fixed OPEX budgets planned in advance of the quarter.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a bug that renders your product unusable and refunds are in order, the flexibility of handling traffic peaks which a cloud provider offers won't solve that problem for you. It could even aggravate it. If a show-stopping bug is introduced, it would probably be preferable to fail quickly.

If there was an outage in early 2000, we just went outside to play, or watch tv. Now if Facebook is down for 15 seconds everyone has heart failure like their life is over.

Amazon uptime is 99.95 which calculates to 43 seconds of downtime everyday.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SMB or indie developers are not the first/primary customers for Azure/AWS that they design their application for. Any enterprise will not want any limits because of spends, they would be lot more pissed if service was pulled because spending cap set by someone sometime in the past is now exceeded. Likely is why such feature is optional not mandatory. Excess/unexpected billing would be negotiated in typical sales cycl…

I 100% work for a large enterprise and we would absolutely like spending policies in place. After all, we have fixed OPEX budgets planned in advance of the quarter.

Having a policy is not same as a hard block, you would want spending alerts and escalations and reports, but do you really want a hard block on crossing a limit ?

Admittedly I don't have experience working with very many devops /SRE teams, however I have never seen any enterprise vendor relationships were spend is hard capped for b2b sales with centrally managed procurement.

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