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I got pwned by my cloud costs

troyhunt.com

651–657 of 657 posts

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#651
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…

> Storage costs money

The dumb solution for that is to exclude persistent storage from the limit.

The nice solution for that is supporting both "runrate" and "consumption" limits.

Using a runrate limit, spinning up an instance, creating a file, etc. allocates budgets for running it continuously, which is released when shutting it down/deleting it. Hitting the limit prevents new resources from being allocated, but keeps existing ones alive. This should be used for persistent storage and instances used to handle base load.

Using a consumption limit, the resource is shut down when the limit is hit. If the shut-off is delayed, the cloud service eats the overage, since they control the delay. This should be used for bandwidth, paid api-calls, and auto-scaling instances.

The user should be able to create multiple limits of each kind, and assign different services to such limits. Alerts when going near the limit can help the user raise it, if that's their intention.

For consumption, it might also make sense to have rate limiters, which throttle after a burst budget is exceeded, similar to how compute works on T instances on AWS. But those probably only make sense for individual services, not globally (e.g. throttle an instance to 100 Mbit/s after it exhausted its 5 TB/day bandwidth allocation, or throttle an API to x calls/s).

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#652

Question, is the 0.014AUD per GB quoted here correct? Looking at the linked page[1] I would think the cost would be 0.1102AUD per GB as is quoted in the Internet egress section. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-au/pricing/details/bandwidth/

It clearly isn't. It looks like he confusing transfers between availability zones in one region with egress to the internet. A factor 10 mistake like that should be obvious, but he didn't fix it, even after I pointed it out in the comments on his blog (he responded that the price for me might be different due to region/currency settings).

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#653
post #158
post #18

Interestingly, Troy says that egress is expensive on Azure at $0.014 AUD/gB (~$0.010 USD/gB), but that is the same price as additional egress for Linode and DO, and Linode egress has never struck me as expensive. In fact, I’m kind of shocked (as an AWS user) that Azure egress is the same price as Linode. Actually, wow it seems AWS is also the same price as Linode and DO for egress. While Linodes and DO do come with d…

How can $10 per TB not strike you as expensive? You can easily download that much a day on consumer broadband that will cost you far less than $10/day.

$10/TB is between availability zones in the same region. Egress to the internet costs $50-$90. So it's much more expensive than the already expensive $10.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#654
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dark patterns - this sounds like a colour scheme you don't care for. "Predatory death-trap pricing" captures the spirit of the thing with rather more clarity. It is wholly intentional after all.

> Dark patterns - this sounds like a colour scheme you don't care for. I can see your point- if I'd never seen the term before I might have a similar reaction. But it's quite a common term now I think.

Not it is not. It is common industry jargon for people who work with websites. Nobody else knows what it is. If you had to pick a term to sound as inoffensive as possible for fraudulent, deceptive conduct while still sort of capturing the thing without being abjectly false you could do no better than something that sounds like a colourscheme.

"Mr Politician what do you think about $big_co using dark patterns?"

"Mr Politician what do you think about $big_co engaging in predatory death-trap pricing schemes to defraud consumers?"

What is being asked in one of those questions is clear to everybody. The other is jargon and excludes the majority of the population from understanding the intended meaning. And note, you don't have to agree that it is "predatory death-trap pricing" at all. That is simply in the above sentence an accusation. Words have meanings. That the accusation be understood clearly by as many people as possible is important.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#655

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…

In between your two extremes are colocation (no managing buildings, power, cooling, racks, security, optionally network), dedicated servers (no managing/installing servers, disks, warranties) and basic VMs.

We do colocation and we have to deal with HD and ram failures from time to time. Replacement of the hardware part is managed by the provider, but discovery and software requieres our involvment.

I just wonder what happens if a ram or hd failure hits a cloud provider node. Is the architecture on average really able to come over such failures without help and intervention.

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#656
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…

CloudFlare tiered cache is now free BTW

Re: I got pwned by my cloud costs

#657
post #654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Dark patterns - this sounds like a colour scheme you don't care for. I can see your point- if I'd never seen the term before I might have a similar reaction. But it's quite a common term now I think.

Not it is not. It is common industry jargon for people who work with websites. Nobody else knows what it is. If you had to pick a term to sound as inoffensive as possible for fraudulent, deceptive conduct while still sort of capturing the thing without being abjectly false you could do no better than something that sounds like a colourscheme. "Mr Politician what do you think about $big_co using dark patterns?" "Mr Po…

I appreciate your point that as many people need to know the meaning accusations and that meaning is important, and I agree.

However regarding your other claims- I dont work on websites, I know the term "dark pattern". so your assertion that "nobody else knows what it is" is false. You might then argue that I'm still in tech, but that's just another goalpost that I can reach anyway: if you google for the term you'll find vox articles, explainer sites, even newyorktimes articles using this term.

So yes, it's a common place term and your assertion to the contrary does not hold any water.

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