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Comment by intricatedetail | Hacker News Reader

That's why I don't use cloud offerings. Their pricing models are designed to trap someone with a exorbitant bill and you don't have control over it. For example let's say you put an image on a CDN and someone who doesn't like you runs AB for a couple of days making billions of requests to bankrupt you or someone finds a page that runs costly queries and sets up curl against it. No thanks.

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I think this is actually an admirable example of why Firebase is a fantastic option for a startup. This company had made no optimisations for this and would have lost a rare opportunity for virality.

Would you pay 30k$ for 2million people to look at and try your site? I would for any business I was running. If your servers were on fire at the start of that, would you pay 30k to keep your servers up?

I actually switched from AWS/Cloudfront to Cloudflare because pricing isn't based on bandwidth and I have greater control over security and access (firewall, rules, etc)

I had a string of sketchy accounts using my SaaS service as a file host which ran up a bill of about 1.5k. Obviously I put some safeguards in place (firewall, rules, alerts), but the scenario you're mentioning does happen and is largely mitigated by using a service with a pricing model like Cloudflare's.

Interesting, I saved roughly 2M USD / year for customers moving them to the cloud. Your example is silly, all of the CDN I set up has very strict limit on how much a single IP can use and have multiple alerts if you are passing 100, 200, 500, etc. USD limits. On the top of that if that is not enough you can add more limitations to avoid that exact scenario that a public resource can be abused to cause you financial troubles. It won't "bankrupt" you if you do it right. Just like pretty much every other technology, you need to know it.

The other problem with your comment is that you try to make it sound like it was a single dimension decision to use the cloud. It is never a single dimension questions though.

Not taking sides here, but I think that the cloud is complicated enough (especially for a person that does not specialize in it), to miss one of the edge cases that can lead to the huge bill.

In a few minutes, I can set simple PHP script with curl, that will launch 100 requests each second, using a pool of hundreds of thousands of IP's thank to the rotating VPN.

This is an edge case of course, but it can happen.

I use cloud myself, but only cloud servers, which allows me to control budget better and provides me with an "escape plan", where I can just switch to dedicated quickly.

There is a difference between "cloud" and serverless though. I bet most people are not using something that can autoscale infinite by default.

Absolutely, just like with software engineering missing the edge cases can drive you out of business.

https://dougseven.com/2014/04/17/knightmare-a-devops-caution...

I am not sure why people think that cloud is magically will shield them from every bad decision.

You see this is too complicated and "If you do it right" imply you can get it wrong and go bankrupt. I prefer to use dedicated server with dedicated bandwidth and Kubernetes on top of that. This makes me sleep comfortably at night. I tried the cloud and this was just too much anxiety for me to handle.

It is absolutely not complicated compared to running Kubernetes yourself. You don't have to use serverless and infinite scaling. For things like Azure App Services you don't autoscale to start with and if you want autoscaling it looks like this:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/platfor...

You won't get many surprises there.

Yes, just like driving, if you doing it wrong you got to the hospital or die, if you doing it the right way you get from A to B. Personal responsibility does not go away because you are using the cloud.

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