Tell HN: I DDoSed myself using CloudFront and Lambda Edge and got a $4.5k bill

Re:Tell HN: I DDoSed myself using CloudFront and Lambda Edge... by jtwebman on Tuesday June 28, 2022 @10:59AM (#31908581)

For small projects why do you need the scale? I feel like once you need the scale serverless is the way more expensive then even managed Kubernetes. I still think serverless is hosting services way to make far more money with the illusion that it is easier when it really isn't. Logging is normally a huge pain. Local dev is usually a huge pain. Managing versions is a pain over just git branches especially over multiple environments. It is a pain to setup different environments and full CI/CD. In then end they might be ok with prototypes but real big systems they are huge pain but that is just my real life experience.

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Re:Tell HN: I DDoSed myself using CloudFront and Lambda Edge... by aelzeiny on Tuesday June 28, 2022 @11:27AM (#31908961)

To expand on this OP, I've done the AWS-full-stack approach in a mid-sized startup. Modern Serverless problems require modern serverless solutions. That ecosystem is simply not as developed as "traditional" web-server CI/CD. Here are some things that you will eventually need to optimize for.

- After crossing a certain threshold in scaling needs, Lambda costs more than regular EC2 on ELB

- Lambda cold-start times can be a deal-breaker when users first visit your website. If you contact AWS they will tell you to setup a simple cron job that keep lambdas "warm". But AWS provides no visibility in what's warm or cold, or which endpoints link to which lambdas.

- Dealing with Cloudwatch logs of various lambda runs (IMHO) is objectively a bad dev experience. Query insights is getting better, but is still a pain to work with.

- To reduce deployment and development times, you'll eventually want to deep-dive into lambda layers. Modern problems modern solutions.

- One lambda calling and awaiting another lambda is not a supported first-class use-case. There's no API that allows you to get the status of a lambda run. There's a hack around this where you use AWS Step-Functions. Modern problems modern solutions.

We're still on AWS full-stack "serverless" for our webserver and realtime stream processor. At the time I didn't know what I was getting my company into. I wish I just made a Flask webserver instead.

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Re:Tell HN: I DDoSed myself using CloudFront and Lambda Edge... by turtlebits on Tuesday June 28, 2022 @12:45PM (#31910035)

Serverless isn't just about scale, it's about deploying code without having to touch any infrastructure. The lambda free tier is also very generous (1M free requests per month).

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Re:Tell HN: I DDoSed myself using CloudFront and Lambda Edge... by sitzkrieg on Tuesday June 28, 2022 @12:36PM (#31909910)

its simple: they dont

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