Ask HN: So you moved off Heroku, where did you go?

Re:Ask HN: So you moved off Heroku, where did you go? by Test0129 on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @03:16AM (#33077409)

For personal stuff or business? I'm extremely familiar with AWS at the corporate level but I refuse to use it for personal stuff. Not only are the pricing schemes suspect, the results can be surprising. A single front page feature on HN, for example, could suddenly cost you $150,000 because you didn't wade through enough labyrinthine configuration pages to set the right budgets.

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Re:Ask HN: So you moved off Heroku, where did you go? by INTPenis on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @07:59AM (#33079132)

I use AWS for personal stuff and it's not labyrinthine at all, I found it very simple to set a budget alert.

But more important than that is of course to have a CloudFront cache infront of anything that exposes S3 storage.

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Re:Ask HN: So you moved off Heroku, where did you go? by laundermaf on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @03:20PM (#33085380)

I hope you don't wake up 7 hours after a budget alert because you're in the wrong timezone. Please stop justifying the huge risks AWS knowingly carries. It would be easy to place a hard cap, but they refuse to do so.

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Re:Ask HN: So you moved off Heroku, where did you go? by INTPenis on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @07:36PM (#33088711)

AWS gives you all the tools you need to shoot your foot off, they also give you all the tools you need to avoid this. I can easily hook up a budget alert to a pushover alert on my phone that is just as likely to wake me up as any alert duty would.

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Re:Ask HN: So you moved off Heroku, where did you go? by laundermaf on Wednesday October 05, 2022 @01:29AM (#33091629)

Most people don't have alert duty. I don't want alert duty. I want safety and it's extremely easy to provide it.

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Re:Ask HN: So you moved off Heroku, where did you go? by INTPenis on Wednesday October 05, 2022 @04:47AM (#33092923)

You just said that there's a danger of not waking up to a budget alert, and then you say you don't want alert duty. Make up your mind.

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Re:Ask HN: So you moved off Heroku, where did you go? by movedx on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @03:49AM (#33077579)

So you're saying that if someone buys access to a kitchen, doesn't learn to cook or operate it safely, burns the place down trying to serve 100,000 people, they'll get a big insurance claim made against them and have a $150k bill? You're kidding me? Are you telling me people have to learn to USE these tools if they don't want a nasty surprise? :-P

(I'm being tongue-in-cheek cheeky here.)

I know you're mostly pushing boundaries with your $150k figure, although at this point it wouldn't surprise me, but AWS is a professional tool aimed at professional engineers. They created Lightsail for "personal stuff."

Right tool for the right job, I guess? Although tyou can actually combine the two on a network level (Lightsail and AWS, that is.)

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Re:Ask HN: So you moved off Heroku, where did you go? by Dave3of5 on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @04:29AM (#33077773)

Eek what a hot take.

He's talking about the pricing model not the way to operate it. AWS bills for egress data. You can't operate it in any different way to stop that.

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Re:Ask HN: So you moved off Heroku, where did you go? by movedx on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @05:10AM (#33078008)

Sure about that? So if I have static images going through an ALB to the requesting client, I can't operate in another way to reduce those costs? ... you're sure?

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Re:Ask HN: So you moved off Heroku, where did you go? by ifore on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @06:17AM (#33078375)

Sure you can front static assets with the free Cloudflare tier...

[a] which is fine if you're happy with the inflexibility that free Cloudflare offers. And you live in a country where the free tier doesn't have horrible routing (eg use the Sydney AWS region, put Cloudflare in front of it and then watch your traffic to/from Sydney take a round trip via the US or Singapore)

[b] every single AWS service charges egress fees (ie Cloudfront doesn't help at all)

[c] this does nothing for non-static assets

Am I missing something?

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Re:Ask HN: So you moved off Heroku, where did you go? by movedx on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @06:59AM (#33078678)

> Am I missing something?

No, but you're not the OP above my comment, so my question still stands.

> (eg use the Sydney AWS region, put Cloudflare in front of it and then watch your traffic to/from Sydney take a round trip via the US or Singapore)

I don't understand? I don't have this issue (I'm in Brisbane; I use ap-southeast-2)

> [c] this does nothing for non-static assets

Non-static assets are going to be very tiny in most cases, and the problem then becomes about volume. If you've got volume and your business model doesn't suck, then you can afford the rate (my understanding is AWS' network egress charges are gross compared to other vendors.)

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Re:Ask HN: So you moved off Heroku, where did you go? by Dave3of5 on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @11:14AM (#33081544)

Nice strawman. I never said you can't operate more efficiently.

Every service on AWS charges egress fees that's my comment. There are other cloud operators that do not. I can safely run some static compute / storage / network at a fixed cost, you can't do this on AWS.

If too many people come to my website it won't wipe out my credit card. The site might go offline but I'd rather take that than a huge bill.

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Re:Ask HN: So you moved off Heroku, where did you go? by movedx on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @06:53PM (#33088246)

> I can safely run some static compute / storage / network at a fixed cost, you can't do this on AWS.

No provider on the planet gives you truly unlimited, fixed cost networking throughput. None.

AWS provides Lightsail for a fixed cost, static compute, storage, and networking solution. It's a not strawman argument just because you don't understand it.

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Re:Ask HN: So you moved off Heroku, where did you go? by sleepyhead on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @10:42AM (#33081078)

I ended up with a $700 bill for a month with Route 53 due to bogus DNS requests (a normal month would be like $5 or something). And there is nothing a professional engineer could do anything about it - except pay $3000/month for AWS Shield Advanced.

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Re:Ask HN: So you moved off Heroku, where did you go? by movedx on Tuesday October 04, 2022 @06:55PM (#33088270)

Can you share the gory details so we can learn more about this? It would be interesting to study what happened, in detail. Perhaps there was a misconfiguration?

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Re:Ask HN: So you moved off Heroku, where did you go? by sleepyhead on Wednesday October 05, 2022 @11:18AM (#33096669)

I made a video about it but it is not published yet. I hope to publish it soon here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkc8xf5A7qCQydN6tG0BmmQ

There was no misconfiguration, just millions of DNS requests but not millions of actual users. I was in contact with AWS support multiple times. The only solution was so use AWS Shield Advanced. They did refund most of the charges but it was too risky for me. Even after I moved DNS provider there was DNS requests to the R53 zones. I can highly recommend https://dnsimple.com though.

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Re:Ask HN: So you moved off Heroku, where did you go? by movedx on Thursday October 06, 2022 @12:20AM (#33104338)

Yeah, the problem is, dnsimple.com isn't going to NOT charge you for the same thing. They have T&Cs too.

I'm guessing AWS refunded close to 100% of fees associated with provable bad DNS requests.

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Re:Ask HN: So you moved off Heroku, where did you go? by sleepyhead on Thursday October 06, 2022 @01:53PM (#33111577)

Why is it a problem that dnsimple is not going to charge for bogus DNS requests? (or any DNS requests for that matter).

AWS did do a refund but it requires me to monitor usage and do some investigation. I really don't want to spend time monitoring DNS requests.

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